Cheaper Is Better: Exploring Price Competitiveness for Online Purchase Prediction

Price, a crucial factor determining whether a user will purchase an item, has attracted considerable attention in personalized ranking and recommendation. Existing studies commonly assume that only item price affects user online purchase decisions. However, in reality, users not only focus on the price of an item itself but also compare the price with the item's “comparison prices,” including its past prices, prices of similar items, and prices on other e-commerce platforms. Without carefully considering these comparison prices, methods fail to capture the purchase motivation attributable to prices comprehensively. To address this problem, in this paper, we introduce the concept of item price competitiveness. An item's price competitiveness measures the advantage of the item's price over its comparison prices. Then, a novel Price Competitiveness-aware Network (PCNet) is proposed to predict users' purchase behaviors by explicitly considering the price competitiveness of items. Specifically, PCNet consists of three key modules, and each module exploits one corresponding facet of price competitiveness. We leverage prior knowledge discovered from a real-world dataset to guide module designs, thus enhancing the performance and interpretability of the PCNet. Offline experiments show the superiority of the PCNet and verify the effectiveness of each module. Moreover, PCNet has been deployed online in a hotel search engine at Fliggy and benefits both the platform and users.