Influencing customer preferences to achieve sales objectives
- Pathum Thani, Thailand : Asian Institute of Technology, 2009
- 53 p. : ill. + 1 online resource
- Thesis ; no. IM-09-06 .
- Asian Institute of Technology. Thesis ; no. IM-09-06 .
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Information Management, School of Engineering and Technology
Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2009
Online shopping is one of the most popular applications in the Internet. Current online shopping systems usually employ recommendation technologies to assist customers in choosing the best product based on their preferences. However, most of recommendation systems are neutral. They do not have their own utility and only focus on how to effectively elicit the customers preferences, not how to affect them. Recent results in customer behavior and decision analysis research have shown that the customers preferences are actually constructive and thus can be influenced. This thesis works on how to design a self-interested automatic sales agent that can influence the customers preferences to maximize its utility. A general framework for such a capability was proposed and a prototype was built to evaluate the framework. The evaluation results showed that our sales agent can achieve on average higher utility than that of normal recommendation systems while getting the same customers average utility and satisfaction level.