Recommendations for optimizing the collective user experience

Behzad Golshan, Evimaria Terzi, Panayiotis Tsaparas

Abstract: Traditional recommender systems aim to satisfy individual users by providing them with recommendations that match their preferences. Such recommender systems don't take into consideration how the number of users recommended to use a particular item affects the users' experience. For example, a highly-recommended restaurant may match the preferences of many users. However, increasing its popularity via recommendations may make the experience unsatisfactory due to high volume of customers, long lines and inevitably slow service. In this paper, we develop a new recommendation-system paradigm that we call collective recommendations. Collective recommendations take into consideration not only the user preferences, but also the effect of the popularity of a venue to the overall user experience. We formally define the algorithmic problems motivated by collective recommendations and develop an algorithmic framework for solving them effectively. Our experiments with real data demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in practice. Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded — Yogi Berra