A network centrality method for the rating problem

Abstract

We propose a new method for aggregating the information of multiple reviewers rating multiple products. Our approach is based on the network relations induced between products by the rating activity of the reviewers. We show that our method is algorithmically implementable even for large numbers of both products and consumers, as is the case for many online sites. Moreover, comparing it with the simple average, which is mostly used in practice, and with other methods previously proposed in the literature, it performs very well under various dimension, proving itself to be an optimal trade--off between computational efficiency, accordance with the reviewers original orderings, and robustness with respect to the inclusion of systematically biased reports.