Group Recommendations: Axioms, Impossibilities, and Random Walks

Omer Lev
(University of Toronto)
Moshe Tennenholtz
(Technion)

We introduce an axiomatic approach to group recommendations, in line of previous work on the axiomatic treatment of trust-based recommendation systems, ranking systems, and other foundational work on the axiomatic approach to internet mechanisms in social choice settings. In group recommendations we wish to recommend to a group of agents, consisting of both opinionated and undecided members, a joint choice that would be acceptable to them. Such a system has many applications, such as choosing a movie or a restaurant to go to with a group of friends, recommending games for online game players, & other communal activities.

Our method utilizes a given social graph to extract information on the undecided, relying on the agents influencing them. We first show that a set of fairly natural desired requirements (a.k.a axioms) leads to an impossibility, rendering mutual satisfaction of them unreachable. However, we also show a modified set of axioms that fully axiomatize a group variant of the random-walk recommendation system, expanding a previous result from the individual recommendation case.

In Jérôme Lang: Proceedings Sixteenth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK 2017), Liverpool, UK, 24-26 July 2017, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 251, pp. 382–397.
Published: 25th July 2017.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.251.28 bibtex PDF
References in reconstructed bibtex, XML and HTML format (approximated).
Comments and questions to: eptcs@eptcs.org
For website issues: webmaster@eptcs.org