[flashman]

It may be an urban myth, but somebody told me Amazon tweaked their recommendation algorithm to occasionally provide random items, the thinking being that people might be persuaded to buy something on the mere suggestion that they would like it.

[aab0]

A multi-armed bandit will occasionally provide 'random' items as part of the exploration phase. Perhaps that's what's going on, and not any sort of diabolical self-fulfilling prophecy.

[praccu]

Thorsten Joachims gave a talk at Amazon Machine Learning Conference 2015, about doing specifically that. That may be what someone was talking about. I've been trying to find the paper related to the work, but am struggling to find it.