Conflict Management for Constraint-based Recommendation

Franz Wotawa, Martin Stettinger, Florian Reinfrank, Gerald Ninaus, Alexander Felfernig

Abstract: Constraint-based recommendation systems are well-established in several domains like cars, computers, and financial services. Such recommendation tasks are based on sets of product constraints and customer preferences. Customer preferences reduce the number of products which are relevant for the customer. In scenarios like that it may happen that the set of customer preferences is inconsistent with the set of constraints in the recommendation system. In order to repair an inconsistency, the customer is informed about possible ways to adapt his/her preferences. There are different possibilities to present this information to the customer: a) via preferred diagnoses, b) via preferred conflicts, and c) via similar products. On the basis of the results of an empirical study we show that diagnoses, conflicts, and similar products are evaluated differently by users in terms of understandability, user satisfaction, and conflict resolution effort.