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4.4 A Social Network-Based Recommender System (SNRS)
Before we present SNRS, let us first use Angela's story to recall the critical factors
in our buying decisions. Angela wants to watch a movie on a weekend. Her favorite
movies are dramas. From the Internet, she finds two movies that are particularly
interesting - “Revolutionary Road” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”.
These two movies are all highly rated on the message board at Yahoo Movies.
Because she cannot decide which movie to watch, she calls her best friend Linda
with whom she often socializes. Linda has not viewed these two movies either, but
she knows that one of her office mates had just watched “Revolutionary Road” and
highly recommended it. So Linda suggests “Why don't we go to watch Revolution-
ary Road together?” Angela is certainly willing to take Linda's recommendation
and has a fun night at the movies with her friend.
If we review this scenario, we can see at least three factors that really contribute
to Angela's final decision. The first factor is Angela's own preference for drama
movies. If Angela did not like drama movies, she would be less likely to pick
something like “Revolutionary Road” to begin with. The second factor is the global
popularity of these two movies. If these movies had received unfavorable reviews,
Angela would most likely lose interest and stop any further investigation. Finally, it
is the recommendation from Angela's friend, Linda, which leads to Angela's finally
choosing “Revolutionary Road”. Interestingly, Linda's opinion is also influenced
by her office mate. If we consider the decisions that we make in our daily lives,
many of them are actually influenced by these three factors.
Figure 4.2 further illustrates how these three factors impact upon customers'
final buying decisions. Intuitively, a customer's buying decision or rating is decided
by both his/her own preference for similar items and his/her knowledge about the
Fig. 4.2 The three factors that influence a customer's buying decision: user preference for similar
items, information regarding the target item from the public media, and feedback from friends
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