2013/11/22 by Kartik Hosanagar, Daniel Fleder, Dokyun Lee +1 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · Computer Science · #Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing #Digital Marketing and Social Media #Recommender Systems and Techniques
paper · doi:10.1287/mnsc.2013.1808
openalex publication_date 2013/11/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/19
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. This paper was accepted by Sandra Slaughter, information systems.