The Wisdom of Networks: Matching Recommender Systems and Social Network Theories

This paper aims to analyzing the match between social network theories and recommender systems. Several social network theories provide explanations on why nodes link to each others. At the same time, recommender systems recommend users to connect to some items according to different internal algorithms. The study identifies the theoretical mechanisms behind the main types of recommender algorithms, and specifically behind network-based ones. Main design implications for recommender algorithms are derived.