The Impact of Social Connections in Personalization

Personalization is typically based on preferences extracted from the interactions of users with the system. A recent trend is to also account for the social influence among users, which may play a non-negligible role in shaping one's individual preferences. The underlying assumptions are that friends tend to develop similar taste, i.e., homophily, and that similar users tend to connect to each other, i.e., social selection. In this work, we investigate the conditions under which social influence has a significant impact on the preferences of users. We find that pairs of friends, where one is socially very active whereas the other is not, exhibit stronger correlations in their preferences compared to other pairs of friends, implying thus a stronger mechanism of influence.