No-Regret Bayesian Recommendation to Homogeneous Users

TL;DR

This paper develops online Bayesian recommendation strategies for platforms that observe product states and aim to persuade users while learning preferences, achieving near-optimal regret bounds in an online setting.

Contribution

It introduces no-regret online Bayesian recommendation policies with provable regret bounds and formulates the problem as a linear program for improved performance.

Findings

Achieved double logarithmic regret in the number of rounds.

Established a lower bound on regret dependence on rounds.

Designed a linear programming-based policy with polynomial state dependence.

Abstract

We introduce and study the online Bayesian recommendation problem for a recommender system platform. The platform has the privilege to privately observe a utility-relevant \emph{state} of a product at each round and uses this information to make online recommendations to a stream of myopic users. This paradigm is common in a wide range of scenarios in the current Internet economy. The platform commits to an online recommendation policy that utilizes her information advantage on the product state to persuade self-interested users to follow the recommendation. Since the platform does not know users' preferences or beliefs in advance, we study the platform's online learning problem of designing an adaptive recommendation policy to persuade users while gradually learning users' preferences and beliefs en route. Specifically, we aim to design online learning policies with no \emph{Stackelberg regret} for the platform, i.e., against the optimal benchmark policy in hindsight under the assumption that users will correspondingly adapt their responses to the benchmark policy. Our first result is an online policy that achieves double logarithmic regret dependence on the number of rounds. We also present an information-theoretic lower bound showing that no adaptive online policy can achieve regret with better dependency on the number of rounds. Finally, by formulating the platform's problem as optimizing a linear program with membership oracle access, we present our second online recommendation policy that achieves regret with polynomial dependence on the number of states but logarithmic dependence on the number of rounds.