‘Recommended for You’: How Well Does Personalized Marketing Work?

Anyone who shops regularly online has encountered recommender systems that point out one or two other products or pieces of content we might like, based on past purchases or other behavior. In two new papers, Wharton operations, information and decisions professor Kartik Hosanagar examined when recommender systems work well, and when they don’t, and whether certain types of products tend to do particularly well when included in such systems. He also looked at how recommender systems interact with other features designed to drive purchases, such as customer reviews.