Trust-based recommendation systems: an axiomatic approach

High-quality, personalized recommendations are a key feature in many online systems. Since these systems often have explicit knowledge of social network structures, the recommendations may incorporate this information. This paper focuses on networks that represent trust and recommendation systems that incorporate these trust relationships. The goal of a trust-based recommendation system is to generate personalized recommendations by aggregating the opinions of other users in the trust network. In analogy to prior work on voting and ranking systems, we use the axiomatic approach from the theory of social choice. We develop a set of five natural axioms that a trustbased recommendation system might be expected to satisfy. Then, we show that no system can simultaneously satisfy all the axioms. However, for any subset of four of the five axioms we exhibit a recommendation system that satisfies those axioms. Next we consider various ways of weakening the axioms, one of which leads to a uniq...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Reid Andersen, Christian Borgs, Jennifer T. Chayes, Uriel Feige, Abraham D. Flaxman, Adam Kalai, Vahab S. Mirrokni, Moshe Tennenholtz
• Keywords: Internet Technology, Natural Axioms, Recommendation Systems, Unique Recommendation, WWW 2008