An incentive-based architecture for social recommendations

We present an incentive-based architecture for providing recommendations in a social network. We maintain a distinct reputation system for each individual and we rely on users to identify appropriate correlations and rate the items using a system-provided recommendation language. The key idea is to design an incentive structure and a ranking system such that any inaccuracy in the recommendations implies the existence of a profitable arbitrage opportunity, hence making the system resistant to malicious spam and presentation bias. We also show that, under mild assumptions, our architecture provides users with incentive to minimize the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the ratings and the actual item qualities, quickly driving the system to an equilibrium state with accurate recommendations. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.4.m [Information Systems Applications]: Miscellaneous General Terms Economics, Theory Keywords Incentives, Information aggregation, Recommender systems ∗Rese...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: RECSYS
• Authors: Rajat Bhattacharjee, Ashish Goel, Konstantinos Kollias
• Keywords: Control Systems, Management Science, NSF ITR Grant, RECSYS 2009, Stanford University