研究推荐系统在市场中的价值:个性化推荐比公开排名更有效,尤其在需求拥挤时。
Impact of Rankings and Personalized Recommendations in Marketplaces
- 用简化模型分析公开排名与个性化推荐的效用差异。
- 容量受限下,个性化推荐能显著提升整体福利,公开排名仅重分配资源。
- 适合关注平台设计、匹配机制和信息价值的研究者阅读。
决策常需在信息不全、偏好未定的情况下从大量选项中选择。公共排名和个性化推荐作为信息工具,对引导选择至关重要,但其在不同市场环境下的福利影响仍不清楚。本文构建一个大市场简化模型,量化了在无供应约束和有供应约束条件下这两类工具的总体价值。个体效用由共性质量(群体层面)和个性匹配度(个体层面)加权构成。代理人接收到这两部分的噪声信号:公开排名改善共性质量估计,个性化推荐额外揭示个性匹配度。在无供应约束时,两类工具均通过优化选择提升福利;其相对价值取决于偏好异质性:偏好越同质,排名越有效;异质性越高,个性化边际价值越大。相反,在供应受限情况下,学习共性质量仅实现资源重分配,无法提升平均福利;而揭示个性匹配度可显著增益,缓解热门项目拥堵,释放匹配专属价值。核心结论在多种模型扩展下依然稳健,包括不同极值尾分布和供应方优先级异质性。引入策略性定价后,发现总盈余虽扩大,新增价值最终被市场短边获取。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Decision-making often requires individuals to navigate large sets of options with incomplete information and imperfectly formed preferences. Information provisioning tools, such as public rankings and personalized recommendations, have become central to guiding these choices, yet their welfare implications across different market environments remain poorly understood. This paper studies a stylized large-market model to quantify the aggregate value of these tools under uncapacitated supply and capacitated supply. Agent utility is a weighted combination of a common term (population-level quality) and an idiosyncratic term (individual-specific fit). Agents observe noisy signals of these components: public rankings improve estimates of common quality, while personalized recommendations additionally reveal idiosyncratic fit. In uncapacitated settings, both tools improve welfare through better selection. Their relative value is governed by preference heterogeneity: rankings are highly effective when preferences are relatively homogeneous, whereas the marginal value of personalization grows as heterogeneity increases. In stark contrast, under capacity constraints, a strict conservation logic applies: learning common quality primarily reshuffles assignments without increasing aggregate average agent welfare. However, revealing idiosyncratic fit generates substantial welfare gains by mitigating congestion on overdemanded items and unlocking match-specific value. We demonstrate that these core insights are robust across model extensions including alternative extreme-value tail distributions and heterogeneous supply-side priorities. Finally, introducing strategic supply-side pricing reveals a stark distributional dichotomy: while information expands total surplus, the newly generated value is ultimately extracted by the short side of the market.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。