Understanding Echo Chambers in E-commerce Recommender Systems

Understand

Personalized recommendation benefits users in accessing contents of interests effectively.

• Current research on recommender systems mostly focuses on matching users with proper items based on user interests.
• However, significant efforts are missing to understand how the recommendations influence user preferences and behaviors, e.g., if and how recommendations result in \textit{echo chambers}.
• Extensive efforts have been made in examining the phenomenon in online media and social network systems.