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Investigating mere-presence effects of recommendations on the consumer choice process

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conference contribution
posted on 2025-05-08, 19:38 authored by Sören Köcher, Dietmar Jannach, Michael Jugovac, Hartmut H. Holzmüller
In various application domains, recommender systems explicitly or implicitly act as virtual advice givers. They are not only used to filter large item sets or point users to unknown but relevant items, their recommendations can also help users to make a decision given a limited choice set. Such a system is usually considered effective if the users adopt the recommendations because, for example, the system's suggestions match their preferences or because they generally trust in the system's benevolence and competence. With this work we aim to further explore the persuasive potential of automated recommendations. Our specific goal was to investigate whether the mere presence of a recommendation has effects on the user's choice process. We conducted two online studies in which participants received either no recommendation or a random recommendation for a given decision scenario. The obtained results showed that the pure existence of recommendations can, depending on the decision scenario, make users more confident in their choices and reduce choice difficulty. Furthermore, we observed that in both studies even random recommendations led to an anchoring effect as the participants' choices were measurably biased by the characteristics of the recommended item.

History

Source title

Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems co-located with ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2016) [presented in CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 1679]

Name of conference

IntRS 2016 Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems

Location

Boston, MA

Start date

2016-09-16

Pagination

2-5

Publisher

CEUR-WS

Place published

Boston, MA

Language

  • en, English

College/Research Centre

Faculty of Business and Law

School

Newcastle Business School

Rights statement

Published under Creative Commons CC0

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