document: Towards a theory model for product search With the growing pervasiveness of the Internet , online search for products and services is constantly increasing . Most product search engines are based on adaptations of theoretical models devised for information retrieval . However , the decision mechanism that underlies the process of buying a product is different than the process of locating relevant documents or objects . We propose a theory model for product search based on expected utility theory from economics . Specifically , we propose a ranking technique in which we rank highest the products that generate the highest surplus , after the purchase . In a sense , the top ranked products are the `` best value for money '' for a specific user . Our approach builds on research on `` demand estimation '' from economics and presents a solid theoretical foundation on which further research can build on . We build algorithms that take into account consumer demographics , heterogeneity of consumer preferences , and also account for the varying price of the products . We show how to achieve this without knowing the demographics or purchasing histories of individual consumers but by using aggregate demand data . We evaluate our work , by applying the techniques on hotel search . Our extensive user studies , using more than 15,000 user-provided ranking comparisons , demonstrate an overwhelming preference for the rankings generated by our techniques , compared to a large number of existing strong state-of-the-art baselines .
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