Summary and perspectives

Abstract

The goal of recommender systems is to provide personalized recommendations of products or services to users facing the problem of information overload on the Web [Adomavicius and Tuzhilin, 2005]. They provide personalized recommendations that best suit a customer’s taste, preferences, and individual needs. Especially on large-scale Web sites where millions of items such as books or movies are offered to the users, recommender system technologies play an increasingly important role. One of their main advantages is that they reduce a user’s decision-making effort [Felfernig et al., 2011; Ricci et al., 2011b]. However, recommender systems are also of high importance from the service provider or system perspective. For instance, they can convince a customer to buy something or develop trust in the system as a whole which ensures customer loyalty and repeat sales gains [Jannach et al., 2010; Ricci et al., 2011a].