Repeat-buying Theory and its Application for Recommender Services

In the context of a virtual university’s information broker we study the consumption patterns for information goods and we investigate if Ehrenberg’s repeat-buying theory which successfully models regularities in a large number of consumer product markets can be applied in electronic markets for information goods, too. First results indicate that Ehrenberg’s repeat-buying theory succeeds in describing the consumption patterns of bundles of complementary information goods reasonably well and that this can be exploited for automatically generating anonymous recommendation services based on such information bundles. An experimental anonymous recommender service has been implemented and is currently evaluated in the Virtual University of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration at http://vu.wu-wien.ac.at.