Online retailers are increasingly using information technologies to provide value added services to customers. Prominent examples of these services are online recommender systems and consumer feedback mechanisms that serve to reduce consumer search costs and uncertainty associated with the...

Recommender systems have been used by online retailers along with various promotions to attract customers. They are often in the form of a single item (best bet) along with a choice set. The majority of choice set recommendations are made based on collaborative filtering algorithms that...

A practical model and an associated method are developed for providing consistent, deterministically correct responses to ad-hoc queries to a database containing a field of binary confidential data. COUNT queries, i.e., the number of selected subjects whose confidential datum is positive, are to...