Psychological elements explaining the consumer's adoption and use of a website recommendation system: A theoretical framework proposal

The purpose of this paper is to understand, with an emphasis on the psychological perspective of the research problem, the consumer's adoption and use of a certain web site recommendation system as well as the main psychological outcomes involved. The approach takes the form of theoretical modelling. Findings: A conceptual model is proposed and discussed. A total of 20 research propositions are theoretically analyzed and justified. Research limitations/implications: The theoretical discussion developed here is not empirically validated. This represents an opportunity for future research. Practical implications: The ideas extracted from the discussion of the conceptual model should be a help for recommendation systems designers and web site managers, so that they may be more aware, when working with such systems, of the psychological process consumers undergo when interacting with them. In this regard, numerous practical reflections and suggestions are presented

The influence of national culture on the attitude towards mobile recommender systems

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2013 Elsevier B.V.This study aimed to identify factors that influence user attitudes towards mobile recommender systems and to examine how these factors interact with cultural values to affect attitudes towards this technology. Based on the theory of reasoned action, belief factors for mobile recommender systems are identified in three dimensions: functional, contextual, and social. Hypotheses explaining different impacts of cultural values on the factors affecting attitudes were also proposed. The research model was tested based on data collected in China, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Findings indicate that functional and social factors have significant impacts on user attitudes towards mobile recommender systems. The relationships between belief factors and attitudes are moderated by two cultural values: collectivism and uncertainty avoidance. The theoretical and practical implications of applying theory of reasoned action and innovation diffusion theory to explain the adoption of new technologies in societies with different cultures are also discussed.National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean governmen

Online Recommendation Systems in a B2C E-Commerce Context: A Review and Future Directions

An online recommendation system (RS) involves using information technology and customer information to tailor electronic commerce interactions between a business and individual customers. Extant information systems (IS) studies on RS have approached the phenomenon from many different perspectives, and our understanding of the nature and impacts of RS is fragmented. The current study reviews and synthesizes extant empirical IS studies to provide a coherent view of research on RS and identify gaps and future directions. Specifically, we review 40 empirical studies of RS published in 31 IS journals and five IS conference proceedings between 1990 and 2013. Using a recommendation process theoretical framework, we categorize these studies in three major areas addressed by RS research: understanding consumers, delivering recommendations, and the impacts of RS. We review and synthesize the extant literature in each area and across areas. Based on the review and synthesis, we surface research gaps and provide suggestions and potential directions for future research on recommendation systems

Consequences of personalized product recommendations and price promotions in online grocery shopping

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Exploring personality-targeted UI design in online social participation systems

We present a theoretical foundation and empirical findings demonstrating the effectiveness of personality-targeted design. Much like a medical treatment applied to a person based on his specific genetic profile, we argue that theory-driven, personality-targeted UI design can be more effective than design applied to the entire population. The empirical exploration focused on two settings, two populations and two personality traits: Study 1 shows that users' extroversion level moderates the relationship between the UI cue of audience size and users' contribution. Study 2 demonstrates that the effectiveness of social anchors in encouraging online contributions depends on users' level of emotional stability. Taken together, the findings demonstrate the potential and robustness of the interactionist approach to UI design. The findings contribute to the HCI community, and in particular to designers of social systems, by providing guidelines to targeted design that can increase online participation. Copyright © 2013 ACM

Current Challenges and Visions in Music Recommender Systems Research

Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years, thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip. While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and related publications quite sparse. The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second, we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet under-researched, directions in the field

Consumers' intention to use health recommendation systems to receive personalized nutrition advice

Background: Sophisticated recommendation systems are used more and more in the health sector to assist consumers in healthy decision making. In this study we investigate consumers' evaluation of hypothetical health recommendation systems that provide personalized nutrition advice. We examine consumers' intention to use such a health recommendation system as a function of options related to the underlying system (e.g. the type of company that generates the advice) as well as intermediaries (e.g. general practitioner) that might assist in using the system. We further explore if the effect of both the system and intermediaries on intention to use a health recommendation system are mediated by consumers' perceived effort, privacy risk, usefulness and enjoyment. Methods. 204 respondents from a consumer panel in the Netherlands participated. The data were collected by means of a questionnaire. Each respondent evaluated three hypothetical health recommendation systems on validated multi-scale measures of effort, privacy risk, usefulness, enjoyment and intention to use the system. To test the hypothesized relationships we used regression analyses. Results: We find evidence that the options related to the underlying system as well as the intermediaries involved influence consumers' intention to use such a health recommendation system and that these effects are mediated by perceptions of effort, privacy risk, usefulness and enjoyment. Also, we find that consumers value usefulness of a system more and enjoyment less when a general practitioner advices them to use a health recommendation system than if they use it out of their own curiosity. Conclusions: We developed and tested a model of consumers' intention to use a health recommendation system. We found that intermediaries play an important role in how consumers evaluate such a system over and above options of the underlying system that is used to generate the recommendation. Also, health-related information services seem to rely on endorsement by the medical sector. This has considerable implications for the distribution as well as the communication channels of health recommendation systems which may be quite difficult to put into practice outside traditional health service channels

Incorporating Profit Margins into Recommender Systems: A Randomized Field Experiment of Purchasing Behavior and Consumer Trust

A number of recent studies have proposed new recommender designs that incorporate firm-centric measures (e.g., the profit margins of products) along with consumer-centric measures (e.g., relevance of recommended products). These designs seek to maximize the long-term profits from recommender deployment without compromising customer trust. However, very little is known about how consumers might respond to recommender algorithms that account for product profitability. We tested the impact of deploying a profit-based recommender on its precision and usage, as well as customer purchasing and trust, with data from an online randomized field experiment. We found that the profit-based algorithm, despite potential concerns about its negative impact on consumers, is effective in retaining consumers’ usage and purchase levels at the same rate as a content-based recommender. We also found that the profit-based algorithm generated higher profits for the firm. Further, to measure trust, we issued a post-experiment survey to participants in the experiment; we found there were no significant differences in trust across treatment. We related the survey results to the accuracy and diversity of recommendations and found that accuracy and diversity were both positively and significantly related to trust. The study has broader implications for firms using recommenders as a marketing tool, in that the approach successfully addresses the relevance-profit tradeoff in a real-world context