Self-authored interest profiles for personalised recommendations/ created by Reuben Binns

A large portion of the content, recommendations and advertisements shown on the web are targeted, based on a profile of an individual user. This paper explores two ways of creating and using such profiles. Behavioural profiling - a commonly used technique which makes inferences based on an individual's previous activity - is compared to what I call Self-Authored Interest (SAI) profiling, which is based on information explicitly volunteered and controlled by the individual. I present the results of an experimental study comparing the effectiveness of the two systems in generating targeted product recommendations. I find that (a) people respond more positively to product recommendations when they are derived from SAI profiles, and (b) the mere belief that a recommendation comes from an SAI profile is also associated with more positive responses.