Priorities-Based Review Computation

Recently, online vendors and providers manage review systems as a mechanism to advertise their services and goods over the Web. In making their choice, clients can rely on a set of feedback expressing the degree of satisfaction of past users with respect to such services and goods. These feedback, or reviews, may be filtered by categories of users, they may be affected by multiple factors, and they are elaborated in order to obtain an overall score, representing a global indicator aimed at summarising the level of quality of that service. In this paper, we concentrate on multi-factor review, i.e., a review whose value is computed assembling the scores given to a set of parameters that may affect the quality level of a service. Our interest is evaluating the relevance, or dominance, of some parameter with respect to the others. We advocate the use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, a well-known technique born in the area of multi-criteria decision making, to derive the priorities to assign to the scores of the single parameters. We illustrate the proposal on the example of hotel reviews.