Group recommendations - what counts?

Abstract

The main focus of the thesis is to better understand how people decide in groups with a use case in the travel and tourism domain. The goal is to use this knowledge for the future research and design of group decision-support systems, user / group modeling and personalization, and group recommender systems. We take an approach where we observe actual groups before, during and after their decision-making process, having the groups choosing a destination to visit together. Hereby, we investigate a wide range of individual and group characteristics, for instance, explicit preferences, travel behavioral patterns, personality, group diversity, social relationships, etc., and their relation to the travel-related group discussions. Due to the complexity of the tourism product, the travel and tourism domain makes quite a challenging use case for the research of group decision-making. In our best knowledge, we have been the first with an opportunity to look at this topic by accounting for so many dimensions. Our findings indicate that the current research overlooks the importance of this dimensionality, and that future researchers and practitioners will have to account for more than users explicit preferences when designing effective group recommender systems in order to truly help groups in their travel-related group decision-making process.