The Dynamics of Repeat Consumption

We study the patterns by which a user consumes the same item repeatedly over time, in a wide variety domains ranging from checkins at the same business location to re-watches of the same video. We find that recency of consumption is the strongest predictor of repeat consumption. Based on this, we develop a model by which the item from t timesteps ago is reconsumed with a probability proportional to a function of t. We study theoretical properties of this model, develop algorithms to learn reconsumption likelihood as a function of t, and show a strong fit of the resulting inferred function via a power law with exponential cutoff. We then introduce a notion of item quality, show that it alone underperforms our recency-based model, and develop a hybrid model that predicts user choice based on a combination of recency and quality. We show how the parameters of this model may be jointly estimated, and show that the resulting scheme outperforms other alternatives.