Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Group-deal websites, where customers purchase products or services in groups, are an interesting phenomenon on the Web. Each purchase is kicked o#11;ff by a group initiator, and other customers can join in. Customers form communities with people with similar interests and preferences (as in a social network), and this drives bulk purchasing (similar to online stores, but in larger quantities per order, thus customers get a better deal). In this work, we aim to better understand what factors in influence customers' purchasing behavior for such social group-deal websites. We propose two probabilistic graphical models, i.e., a product-centric inference model (PCIM) …