Title: A Multi-Objective Learning to re-Rank Approach to Optimize Online Marketplaces for Multiple Stakeholders,
Abstract: Multi-objective recommender systems address the difficult task of
recommending items that are relevant to multiple, possibly conflicting,
criteria. However these systems are most often designed to address the
objective of one single stakeholder, typically, in online commerce, the
consumers whose input and purchasing decisions ultimately determine the success
of the recommendation systems. In this work, we address the multi-objective,
multi-stakeholder, recommendation problem involving one or more objective(s)
per stakeholder. In addition to the consumer stakeholder, we also consider two
other stakeholders; the suppliers who provide the goods and services for sale
and the intermediary who is responsible for helping connect consumers to
suppliers via its recommendation algorithms. We analyze the multi-objective,
multi-stakeholder, problem from the point of view of the online marketplace
intermediary whose objective is to maximize its commission through its
recommender system. We define a multi-objective problem relating all our three
stakeholders which we solve with a novel learning-to-re-rank approach that
makes use of a novel regularization function based on the Kendall tau
correlation metric and its kernel version; given an initial ranking of item
recommendations built for the consumer, we aim to re-rank it such that the new
ranking is also optimized for the secondary objectives while staying close to
the initial ranking. We evaluate our approach on a real-world dataset of hotel
recommendations provided by Expedia where we show the effectiveness of our
approach against a business-rules oriented baseline model.