What people like you like

strategy+business, November 11, 2020

by Theodore Kinni




Photograph by Paper Boat Creative

I don’t set much store in the endless stream of recommendations offered by Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and most other online businesses. Occasionally, a book, flick, or song pops up that delights me, but most of the suggestions I get either miss the mark or appear suspiciously advantageous to recommendation engine operators and their advertisers.

Michael Schrage, visiting fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and s+b contributor, awakens us to the potential of delightful discovery in his latest book, Recommendation Engines. “Recommendation inspires innovation: that serendipitous suggestion—that surprise—not only changes how you see the world, it transforms how you see—and understand—yourself. Successful recommenders promote discovery of the world and one’s self,” Schrage writes in its introduction. “Recommenders aren’t just about what we might want to buy; they’re about who we might want to become.”

If this smacks of techno-utopianism, well, there is a strong strain of that ideology running through Recommendation Engines. For the most part, however, Schrage grounds this rosy view in the powerful effects that recommenders are already producing and balances it with acknowledgment of these systems’ potential for abuse. He also provides a short history of recommendations and a suitably technical description of how recommendation engines work and are built.

To date, the powerful effects of recommenders have manifested themselves mostly in commerce. Schrage cites a variety of facts in this regard: a survey that found recommendations account for approximately 30 percent of global e-commerce revenues; another that found online shoppers are 4.5 times more likely to buy after clicking on a recommendation; and research that “strongly suggests” recommendations drive roughly a third of Amazon’s sales. Read the rest here.