Ordering innovators and laggards for product categorization and recommendation

Different buyers exhibit different purchasing behaviors. Some rush to purchase new products while others tend to be more cautious, waiting for reviews from people they trust. In market analysis, the former group of buyers is often referred to as innovators and early adopters while the latter group is referred to as laggards. The adoption behavior is a dynamic feature of the user and varies over groups of products, e.g., innovators of literature may not be the innovators of electronics. The adoption order of users is a dynamic feature of the product, which can help to predict the future potential buyers. However, such dynamic features are usually unavailable in the description of products. In this paper, we study the user behavior of an online review website— Epinions.com. We first propose to model user adoption behaviors by creating a total ordering among users who rate the products in a given category. We develop a greedy algorithm and a Markov-chain based algorithm for computin...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: RECSYS
• Authors: Sarah K. Tyler, Shenghuo Zhu, Yun Chi, Yi Zhang
• Keywords: Adoption Behaviors, Control Systems, Dynamic Features, RECSYS 2009, Total Ordering