Tailored Recommendations

Journal article: Many popular internet platforms use so-called collaborative filtering systems to give personalized recommendations to their users, based on other users who provided similar ratings for some items. We propose a novel approach to such recommendation systems by viewing a recommendation as a way to extend an agent's expressed preferences, which are typically incomplete, through some aggregate of other agents' expressed preferences. These extension and aggregation requirements are expressed by an Acceptance and a Pareto principle, respectively. We characterize the recommendation systems satisfying these two principles and contrast them with collaborative filtering systems, which typically violate the Pareto principle.

Author(s)

Eric Danan, Thibault Gajdos, Jean-Marc Tallon

Journal
  • Social Choice and Welfare
Date of publication
  • 2023
Keywords JEL
D71 D81
Keywords
  • Recommendation systems
  • Incomplete preferences
  • Extension
  • Aggregation
  • Pareto principle
  • Collaborative filtering
Pages
  • 15-34
Version
  • 1