Beyond Personalization: Research Directions in Multistakeholder Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper discusses the emerging field of multistakeholder recommendation systems, emphasizing the importance of balancing multiple interests like fairness and profitability beyond just user personalization.

Contribution

It provides an overview of multistakeholder recommendation, its origins, current research examples, and outlines future research directions and open questions.

Findings

Multistakeholder recommendation frameworks address multiple interests.

Current research explores fairness, profitability, and reciprocity.

Open questions include balancing stakeholder needs effectively.

Abstract

Recommender systems are personalized information access applications; they are ubiquitous in today's online environment, and effective at finding items that meet user needs and tastes. As the reach of recommender systems has extended, it has become apparent that the single-minded focus on the user common to academic research has obscured other important aspects of recommendation outcomes. Properties such as fairness, balance, profitability, and reciprocity are not captured by typical metrics for recommender system evaluation. The concept of multistakeholder recommendation has emerged as a unifying framework for describing and understanding recommendation settings where the end user is not the sole focus. This article describes the origins of multistakeholder recommendation, and the landscape of system designs. It provides illustrative examples of current research, as well as outlining open questions and research directions for the field.