What Does it Mean to Give Someone What They Want? The Nature of Preferences in Recommender Systems

A central goal of recommender systems is to select items according to the "preferences" of their users. "Preferences" is a complicated word that has been used across many disciplines to mean, roughly, "what people want." This has been justified by the assumption that people always choose what they want, an idea from 20th-century economics called revealed preference. However, this approach to preferences can lead to a variety of unwanted outcomes including clickbait, addiction, or algorithmic manipulation. Doing better requires both a change in thinking and a change in approach.