Related papers: Analytical and Empirical Study of Herding Effects …
As online shopping becomes ever more prevalent, customers rely increasingly on product rating websites for making purchase decisions. The reliability of online ratings, however, is potentially compromised by the so-called herding effect:…
We analyze some voting models mimicking online evaluation systems intended to reduce the information overload. The minimum number of operations needed for a system to be effective is analytically estimated. When herding effects are present,…
One goal of online social recommendation systems is to harness the wisdom of crowds in order to identify high quality content. Yet the sequential voting mechanisms that are commonly used by these systems are at odds with existing…
Many web services like eBay, Tripadvisor, Epinions, etc, provide historical product ratings so that users can evaluate the quality of products. Product ratings are important since they affect how well a product will be adopted by the…
At a time when information seekers first turn to digital sources for news and opinion, it is critical that we understand the role that social media plays in human behavior. This is especially true when information consumers also act as…
Investigations of social influence in collective decision-making have become possible due to recent technologies and platforms that record interactions in far larger groups than could be studied before. Herding and its impact on…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental algorithmic framework for optimizing recommendation decisions online. Though extensive attention has been paid to tailoring contextual bandits for recommendation applications, the "herding effects"…
With the rapid development of modern technology, the Web has become an important platform for users to make friends and acquire information. However, since information on the Web is over-abundant, information filtering becomes a key task…
Users on the internet usually require venues to provide better purchasing recommendations. This can be provided by a reputation system that processes ratings to provide recommendations. The rating aggregation process is a main part of…
Expertise of annotators has a major role in crowdsourcing based opinion aggregation models. In such frameworks, accuracy and biasness of annotators are occasionally taken as important features and based on them priority of the annotators…
The product reviews are posted online in the hundreds and even in the thousands for some popular products. Handling such a large volume of continuously generated online content is a challenging task for buyers, sellers, and even…
In crowdsourced preference aggregation, it is often assumed that all the annotators are subject to a common preference or utility function which generates their comparison behaviors in experiments. However, in reality annotators are subject…
Recommender systems have received great commercial success. Recommendation has been used widely in areas such as e-commerce, online music FM, online news portal, etc. However, several problems related to input data structure pose serious…
As online reviews increasingly drive consumer decisions, the impact of review interface design on rating authenticity remains under-explored. This research investigates how evaluation sequence ("Rating-First" vs. "Review-First") influences…
Rank aggregation aims to combine the preference rankings of a number of alternatives from different voters into a single consensus ranking. As a useful model for a variety of practical applications, however, it is a computationally…
On the Web, there is always a need to aggregate opinions from the crowd (as in posts, social networks, forums, etc.). Different mechanisms have been implemented to capture these opinions such as "Like" in Facebook, "Favorite" in Twitter,…
Sequential recommendation aims to identify and recommend the next few items for a user that the user is most likely to purchase/review, given the user's purchase/rating trajectories. It becomes an effective tool to help users select…
Increasing online shoppers have generated enormous amount of data in form of reviews (text) and sales data. Aggregate reviews in form of rating (stars) have become noticeable indicators of product quality and vendor performance to…
We propose the Heterogeneous Thurstone Model (HTM) for aggregating ranked data, which can take the accuracy levels of different users into account. By allowing different noise distributions, the proposed HTM model maintains the generality…
Online reviews and recommendation systems help users navigate overwhelming choice, but they are vulnerable to self-reinforcing distortions. This paper examines how a single malicious reviewer can exploit popularity-biased rating dynamics…