Georgetown Law
Technology Review

In 2006, when Netflix was just a DVD rental service, it offered a $1 million prize to the team that could improve Netflix’s movie recommendation algorithm by ten percent.1Katie Hafner, And If You Liked the Movie, a Netflix Contest May Reward You Handsomely, N.Y. TIMES (Oct. 2, 2006), https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/technology/02netflix.html [https://perma.cc/RJV9-9PKQ]. The competition became an academic lightning rod—thousands of teams entered and their work produced dozens of academic works.2See, e.g., Zhou et al., Large Scale Collaborative Filtering for the Netflix Prize, in ALGORITHMIC ASPECTS IN INFORMATION MANAGEMENT 347 (2008). During the first year of the competition, several teams made significant headway; for example, AT&T’s team, KorBell, improved the algorithm by 8.43%.3Robert M. Bell, Yehuda Koren, & Chris Volinksy, All Together Now: A Perspective on the Netflix Prize, 23 AM. ASS’N STAT. J. 24, 29 (2010). But soon, progress stalled. Teams snowballed in size as they pooled their efforts in attempts to gain a few fractions of a percentage point.4Id. Three years later, two teams finally passed the 10.00% improvement mark: BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, a hybrid team of KorBell and Big Chaos, and The Ensemble, a twenty-three-team super group.5Id.

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