Learning User Preferences to Incentivize Exploration in the Sharing Economy

Learning User Preferences to Incentivize Exploration in the Sharing Economy

Abstract

We study platforms in the sharing economy and discuss theneed for incentivizing users to explore options that otherwisewould not be chosen. For instance, rental platforms such asAirbnb typically rely on customer reviews to provide userswith relevant information about different options. Yet, often alarge fraction of options does not have any reviews available.Such options are frequently neglected as viable choices, andin turn are unlikely to be evaluated, creating a vicious cycle.Platforms can engage users to deviate from their preferredchoice by offering monetary incentives for choosing a differ-ent option instead. To efficiently learn the optimal incentivesto offer, we consider structural information in user prefer-ences and introduce a novel algorithm - Coordinated OnlineLearning (CoOL) - for learning with structural informationmodeled as convex constraints. We provide formal guaran-tees on the performance of our algorithm and test the viabil-ity of our approach in a user study with data of apartments onAirbnb. Our findings suggest that our approach is well-suitedto learn appropriate incentives and increase exploration on theinvestigated platform.

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Authors
  • Hirnschall, Christhop
  • Singla, Adish
  • Tschiatschek, Sebastian
  • Krause, Andreas
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Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Divisions
Data Mining and Machine Learning
Event Location
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Event Type
Conference
Event Dates
02.-07.02.2018
Series Name
he Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, The Thirtieth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, The Eighth AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence
ISSN/ISBN
978-1-57735-800-8
Page Range
pp. 2248-2256
Date
2 February 2018
Official URL
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.08331.pdf
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