Just Rate It! Gamification as Part of Recommendation

In attempt to help users in filtering available products, recommender systems are being used by e-commerce systems to try to predict users’ preferences and suggest them new products. Some recommender systems are based in previous ratings and evaluations provided by users to purchased items. When new users or new items join in recommender systems they can suffer by the so called cold-start problem. However, do you rate the products that you bought? This question and other ones were made to 367 participants by an online survey that aims to identify customer profiles and motivations. Also, we investigated user engagement in gamified systems and the effects of tangible and intangible rewards in their behavior. This work presents a theoretical framework that provides basis for defining how gamification can be used to encourage ratings and improve user engagement in tasks that benefit user reputation, item reliability and to overcome cold-start problem.