Online food ordering marketplaces are multistakeholder systems where recommendations impact the experience and growth of each participant in the system. A recommender system in this setting has to encapsulate the objectives and constraints of different stakeholders in order to find utility of an item for recommendation. Constrainedoptimization based approaches to this problem typically involve complex formulations and have high computational complexity in production settings involving millions of entities. Simplifications and relaxation techniques (for example, scalarization) help but introduce sub-optimality and can be time-consuming due to the amount of tuning needed. In this paper, we introduce a method involving multi-goal sampling followed by ranking for userrelevance (Sample-Rank), to nudge recommendations towards multi-objective (MO) goals of the marketplace. The proposed methods novelty is that it reduces the MO recommendation problem to sampling from a desired multi-goal distribution then using it to build a production-friendly learning-to-rank (LTR) model. In offline experiments we show that we are able to bias recommendations towards MO criteria with acceptable tradeoffs in metrics like AUC and NDCG. We also show results from a large-scale online A/B experiment where this approach gave a statistically significant lift of 2.64% in average revenue per order (RPO) (objective #1) with no drop in conversion rate (CR) (objective #2) while holding the average last-mile traversed flat (objective #3), vs. the baseline ranking method. This method also significantly reduces time to model development and deployment in MO settings and allows for trivial extensions to more objectives and other types of LTR models.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.