Multistakeholder recommendation with provider constraints

Recommender systems are typically designed to optimize the utility of the end user. In many settings, however, the end user is not the only stakeholder and this exclusive focus may produce unsatisfactory results for other stakeholders. One such setting is found in multisided platforms, which bring together buyers and sellers. In such platforms, it may be necessary to jointly optimize the value for both buyers and sellers. This paper proposes a constraint-based integer programming optimization model, in which different sets of constraints are used to reflect the goals of the different stakeholders. This model is applied as a post-processing step, so it can easily be added onto an existing recommendation system to make it multistakeholder aware. For computational tractability with larger data sets, we reformulate the integer problem using the Lagrangian dual and use subgradient optimization. In experiments with two data sets, we evaluate empirically the interaction between the utilities of buyers and sellers and show that our approximation can achieve good upper and lower bounds in practical situations.