Marketing Papers
Document Type
Technical Report
Date of this Version
4-2014
Publication Source
Management Science
Volume
60
Issue
4
Start Page
805
Last Page
823
DOI
10.1287/mnsc.2013.1808
Abstract
Personalization is becoming ubiquitous on the World Wide Web. Such systems use statistical techniques to infer a customer's preferences and recommend content best suited to him (e.g., “Customers who liked this also liked...”). A debate has emerged as to whether personalization has drawbacks. By making the Web hyperspecific to our interests, does it fragment Internet users, reducing shared experiences and narrowing media consumption? We study whether personalization is in fact fragmenting the online population. Surprisingly, it does not appear to do so in our study. Personalization appears to be a tool that helps users widen their interests, which in turn creates commonality with others. This increase in commonality occurs for two reasons, which we term volume and product-mix effects. The volume effect is that consumers simply consume more after personalized recommendations, increasing the chance of having more items in common. The product-mix effect is that, conditional on volume, consumers buy a more similar mix of products after recommendations.
Copyright/Permission Statement
Originally published in Management Science © 2014 INFORMS
This is a pre-publication version. The final version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1808
Keywords
information systems, electronic commerce, recommendation systems, collaborative filtering, filter bubble
Recommended Citation
Hosanagar, K., Fleder, D., Lee, D., & Buja, A. (2014). Will the Global Village Fracture into Tribes? Recommender Systems and Their Effects on Consumer Fragmentation. Management Science, 60 (4), 805-823. http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1808
Included in
Advertising and Promotion Management Commons, Applied Behavior Analysis Commons, Behavioral Economics Commons, Business Analytics Commons, Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons, Cognitive Psychology Commons, International Business Commons, Marketing Commons, Technology and Innovation Commons
Date Posted: 15 June 2018
This document has been peer reviewed.