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E-commerce Recommendation with Personalized Promotion

Most existing e-commerce recommender systems aim to recommend the right products to a consumer, assuming the properties of each product are fixed. However, some properties, including price discount, can be personalized to respond to each consumer's preference. This paper studies how to automatically set the price discount when recommending a product, in light of the fact that the price will often alter a consumer's purchase decision. The key to optimizing the discount is to predict consumer's willingness-to-pay (WTP), namely, the highest price a consumer is willing to pay for a product. Purchase data used by traditional e-commerce recommender systems provide points below or above the decision boundary. In this paper we collected training data to better predict the decision boundary. We implement a new e-commerce mechanism adapted from laboratory lottery and auction experiments that elicit a rational customer's exact WTP for a small subset of products, and use a machine learning algorithm to predict the customer's WTP for other products. The mechanism is implemented on our own e-commerce website that leverages Amazon's data and subjects recruited via Mechanical Turk. The experimental results suggest that this approach can help predict WTP, and boost consumer satisfaction as well as seller profit.