Recent research has unveiled the importance of online social networks for improving the quality of recommender systems and encouraged the research community to investigate better ways of exploiting the social information for recommendations. To contribute to this sparse field of research, in this paper we exploit users' interactions along three data sources (marketplace, social network and location-based) to assess their performance in a barely studied domain: recommending products and domains of interests (i.e., product categories) to people in an online marketplace environment. To that end we defined sets of content- and network-based user similarity features for each data source and studied them isolated using an user-based Collaborative Filtering (CF) approach and in combination via a hybrid recommender algorithm, to assess which one provides the best recommendation performance. Interestingly, in our experiments conducted on a rich dataset collected from SecondLife, a popular online virtual world, we found that recommenders relying on user similarity features obtained from the social network data clearly yielded the best results in terms of accuracy in case of predicting products, whereas the features obtained from the marketplace and location-based data sources also obtained very good results in case of predicting categories. This finding indicates that all three types of data sources are important and should be taken into account depending on the level of specialization of the recommendation task.
In the age of information overload, collaborative filtering and recommender systems have become essential tools for content discovery. The advent of online social networks has added another approach to recommendation whereby the social network itself is used as a source for recommendations i.e. users are recommended items that are preferred by their friends. In this paper we develop a new model-based recommendation method that merges collaborative and social approaches and utilizes implicit feedback and the social graph data. Employing factor models, we represent each user profile as a mixture of his own and his friends' profiles. This assumes and exploits "homophily" in the social network, a phenomenon that has been studied in the social sciences. We test our model on the Epinions data and on the Tuenti Places Recommendation data, a large-scale industry dataset, where it outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. While social interactions are critical to understanding consumer behavior, the relationship between social and commerce networks has not been explored on a large scale. We analyze Taobao, a Chinese consumer marketplace that is the world's largest e-commerce website. What sets Taobao apart from its competitors is its integrated instant messaging tool, which buyers can use to ask sellers about products or ask other buyers for advice. In our study, we focus on how an individual's commercial transactions are embedded in their social graphs. By studying triads and the directed closure process, we quantify the presence of information passing and gain insights into when different types of links form in the network. Using seller ratings and review information, we then quantify a price of trust. How much will a consumer pay for transaction with a trusted seller? We conclude by modeling this consumer choice problem: if a buyer wishes to purchase a particular product, how does (s)he decide which store to purchase it from? By analyzing the performance of various feature sets in an information retrieval setting, we demonstrate how the social graph factors into understanding consumer behavior. In this paper we present the latest results of a recently started project that aims at studying the extent to which links between buyers and sellers, i.e. trading interactions in online trading platforms, can be predicted from external knowledge sources such as online social networks. To that end, we conducted a large-scale experiment on data obtained from the virtual world Second Life. As our results reveal, online social network data bears a significant potential (28 over the baseline) to predict links between buyers and sellers in online trading platforms. In the era of social commerce, users often connect from e-commerce websites to social networking venues such as Facebook and Twitter. However, there have been few efforts on understanding the correlations between users' social media profiles and their e-commerce behaviors. This paper presents a system for predicting a user's purchase behaviors on e-commerce websites from the user's social media profile. We specifically aim at understanding if the user's profile information in a social network (for example Facebook) can be leveraged to predict what categories of products the user will buy from (for example eBay Electronics). The paper provides an extensive analysis on how users' Facebook profile information correlates to purchases on eBay, and analyzes the performance of different feature sets and learning algorithms on the task of purchase behavior prediction.