Recommender systems with selfish users

Recommender systems are a fundamental component of contemporary social-media platforms and require feedback submitted from users in order to fulfill their goal. On the other hand, the raise of advocacy about user-controlled data repositories supports the selective submission of data by user through intelligent software agents residing at the user end. These agents are endowed with the task of protecting user privacy by applying a “soft filter” on personal data provided to the system. In this work, we pose the question: “how should the software agent control the user feedback submitted to a recommender system in a way that is most privacy preserving, while the user still enjoys most of the benefits of the recommender system?”. We consider a set of such agents, each of which aims to protect the privacy of its serving user by submitting to the recommender system server a version of her real rating profile. The fact that issued recommendations to a user depend on the collective rating profiles by all agents gives rise to a novel game-theoretic setup that unveils the trade-off between privacy preservation of each user and the quality of recommendation they receive. Privacy is quantified through a distance metric between declared and an “initial” random rating profile; the latter is assumed to provide a “neutral” starting point for the disclosure of the real profile. We allow different users to have different perception of their privacy through a user-dependent utility function of this distance. The quality of recommendations for each user depends on submitted ratings of all users, including the ratings of the user to whom the recommendation is provided. We prove the existence of a Nash equilibrium point (NEP), and we derive conditions for that. We show that user strategies converge to the NEP after an iterative best-response strategy update sequence that involves circulation of aggregate quantities in the system and no revelation of real ratings. We also present various modes of user cooperation in rating declaration, by which users mutually benefit in terms of privacy. We evaluate and compare cooperative and selfish strategies in their performance in terms of privacy preservation and recommendation quality through real movie datasets.