The Application of Contrast Effects in Two-Sided Recommendation Systems

Abstract

Contrast effects refer to a psychological phenomenon where the relative value of a presented item changes based on comparisons with other items. This effect is widely utilized in the fields of marketing and pricing strategy. On the other hand, conventional recommendation systems mainly determine recommended items based on predicted user-item affinity, and thus fail to sufficiently consider factors that contribute to the relative attractiveness of an item, such as the order of presentation or the combination of items being compared. This paper proposes an evaluation function to realize contrast effect-aware recommendations in a two-sided recommendation system, and validates its effectiveness through the results of A/B testing in a real-world service.