Feature-oriented vs. Needs-oriented Product Access for Non-Expert Online Shoppers

Key words: Most online shops today organise their product catalogue in a feature-oriented way. This can cause problems for shoppers who have only limited knowledge of product features. An alternative is to organizing product information in a needs-oriented way. Here possible ways of using the product build the focus of attention. In this study we compared reported preference of catalogue access of non-expert shoppers when confronted with either feature-oriented or needsoriented access to a catalogue of digital cameras

Consumer Acceptance of Recommendations by Interactive Decision Aids: The Joint Role of Temporal Distance and Concrete vs. Abstract Communications

Interactive decision aids (IDAs) typically use concrete product feature-based approaches to interact with consumers. Recently however, interaction designs that focus on communicating abstract consumer needs have been suggested as a promising alternative. This article investigates how temporal distance moderates the effectiveness of these two competing IDA communication designs by its effect on consumers’ mental representation of the product decision problem. Temporal distance is inherently connected to IDAs in two ways. Congruency between consumption timing (immediate vs. distant) and IDA communication design (concrete vs. abstract, respectively) increases the likelihood to accept the IDA’s advice. This effect is also achieved by congruency between IDA process timing (immediate vs. delayed delivery of recommendations) and IDA communication design (concrete vs. abstract, respectively). We further show that this process is mediated by the perceived transparency of the IDA process. Managers and researchers need to take into account the importance of congruency between the user and the interface through which companies interact with their users and can further optimize IDAs so that they better match consumers’ mental representations

Behavioral Effects in Consumer Evaluations of Recommendation Systems

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how designers and marketers can promote the use of technologies aiding online consumers’ decisions. We examine the problem from two different viewpoints that highlight different strategies by which one can influence consumer behavior towards recommendation systems. Overall, this dissertation contributes to the academic literature in a number of ways. Firstly, it offers a first account of the role of anticipated emotions in technology and RA acceptance. Focusing on technology itself, RA use and RA output, it also confirms that the presentation of alternatives at the output stage, as well as the decision strategy implemented by the recommendation system itself, can enhance one’s evaluation of an RA. At a minimum, our findings underscore that these elements need to be considered when designing decision support systems. Understanding the mechanisms through which consumers make technology choices is of great importance for marketing managers when they develop new technology products, services and marketing communication campaigns. Finally, the dissertation presents three actionable ways through which managers and designers can increase RA acceptance and evaluation

Designing recommendation agent

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Improving user confidence in decision support systems for electronic catalogs

Decision support systems for electronic catalogs assist users in making the right decision from a set of possible choices. Common examples of decision making include shopping, deciding where to go for holidays, or deciding your vote in an election. Current research in the field is mainly focused on improving such systems in terms of decision accuracy, i.e. the ratio of correct decisions out of the total number of decisions taken. However, it has been widely recognized recently that another important dimension to consider is how to improve decision confidence, i.e. the certainty of the decision maker that she has made the best decision. We first review multi-attribute decision theory –the underlying framework for electronic catalogs– and present the state-of-the-art research in e-catalogs. We then describe objective and subjective measures to evaluate such systems, and propose a system baseline for achieving more accurate and meaningful comparative evaluations. We propose a framework to study the building of decision confidence within the query-feedback search interaction model, and use it to compare different types of system feedback proposed in the literature. We argue that different types of system feedback based on constraints (e.g. conflict and corrective feedback), even if not novel as such, can be combined in order to improve decision confidence. This claim is further validated by simulations and experimental evaluation comparing constraint-based feedback to ranked list feedback

Scalable intelligent electronic catalogs

The world today is full of information systems which make huge quantities of information available. This incredible amount of information is clearly overwhelming Internet endusers. As a consequence, intelligent tools to identify worthwhile information are needed, in order to fully assist people in finding the right information. Moreover, most systems are ultimately used, not just to provide information, but also to solve problems. Encouraged by the growing popular success of Internet and the enormous business potential of electronic commerce, e-catalogs have been consolidated as one of the most relevant types of information systems. Nearly all currently available electronic catalogs are offering tools for extracting product information based on key-attribute filtering methods. The most advanced electronic catalogs are implemented as recommender systems using collaborative filtering techniques. This dissertation focuses on strategies for coping with the difficulty of building intelligent catalogs which fully support the user in his purchase decision-making process, while maintaining the scalability of the whole system. The contributions of this thesis lie on a mixed-initiative system which is inspired by observations on traditional commerce activities. Such a conversational model consists basically of a dialog between the customer and the system, where the user criticizes proposed products and the catalog suggests new products accordingly. Constraint satisfaction techniques are analyzed in order to provide a uniform framework for modeling electronic catalogs for configurable products. Within the same framework, user preferences and optimization constraints are also easily modeled. Searching strategies for proposing the adequate products according to criteria are described in detail. Another dimension of this dissertation faces the problem of scalability, i.e., the problem of supporting hundreds, or thousands of users simultaneously using intelligent electronic catalogs. Traditional wisdom would presume that in order to provide full assistance to users in complex tasks, the business logic of the system must be complex, thus preventing scalability. SmartClient is a software architectural model that uses constraint satisfaction problems for representing solution spaces, instead of traditional models which represent solution spaces by collections of single solutions. This main idea is supported by the fact that constraint solvers are extreme in their compactness and simplicity, while providing sophisticated business logic. Different SmartClient architecture configurations are provided for different uses and architectural requirements. In order to illustrate the use of constraint satisfaction techniques for complex electronic catalogs with the SmartClient architecture, a commercial Internet-based application for travel planning, called reality, has been successfully developed. Travel planning is a particularly appropriate domain for validating the results of this research, since travel information is dynamic, travel planning problems are combinatorial, and moreover, complex user preferences and optimization constraints must be taken into consideration