Toward Deep Understanding of Persuasive Product Recommendation Agents

Product recommendation agents (PRA) are systems built to facilitate customers’ products purchase on e-commerce websites. Prior literature focuses on the “shaping” effects of PRA to customers’ decision making. More challengingly, PRA can be built to change customers’ product choice by combining with persuasive features. This paper explores this new type of PRA “persuasive product recommendation agents” (PPRA). In this paper, we make a distinction of PPRA with neutral and deceptive ones. The basic functioning principle of PPRA is stated and a classification of persuasive tactics is made. We propose the mechanism via which PPRA work by incorporating elaboration likelihood model, 4w and theory of reasoned action together. Despite marketing usage, the proposed PPRA can be used to benefit society by promoting green purchases or encouraging charity. The theory also has the generalizability to be used in decision making contexts like healthcare and education. Discussion and future research directions are made

INVOLVEMENT PRACTICES IN PERSUASIVE SERVICE ENCOUNTERS: THE CASE OF HOME SECURITY ADVICE

Advisors providing non-commercial service encounters are neither trained nor explicitly incentivized to persuade the advisee. However, a whole range of encounters may benefit from enhanced persuasiveness to prevent the advisee from taking counterproductive decisions. Persuasion literature from the field of social psychology points to the persuadee’s involvement as a central factor of persuasive effect. Nevertheless, little is known on how persuader addresses persuadee’s involvement and how those efforts can be supported by means of modern technology, especially in the non-commercial service encounters. Based on a detailed analysis of experimental service encounters and supported by the in situ studies of real advisory sessions, this study identifies a set of involvement practices, i.e., conversational practices that advisors engage in when trying to improve the advisee’s involvement and illustrates how these practices can be afforded with modern multimedia technology. Thereby, the manuscript proposes to bridge the notions of involvement from the conversation studies and from the persuasion literature. By pointing to the influence of IT on persuasive behaviour in service encounters, it brings together the concept of persuasive technology and service support as a subfield of IS. The manuscript offers novel perspective for framing the conversations and the practices in service encounters

Exploring the Effects of Persuasive Designs of Intelligent Advice-Giving Systems on Users’ Trust Perceptions, Advice Acceptance, and Reuse Intentions

With artificial intelligence (AI) penetrating into a broad range of industries in the current age, it has an impact on our daily living in a more and more profound way. Interacting with AI-based systems for advice has become a common practice as well. As advice-giving systems (AGS) become more cognitive and human-like, they can influence users’ decision-making to a new level. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to explore this new type of intelligent system and examine how users perceive and react to the system’s persuasive influence. Based on the persuasion knowledge model, this paper identifies various persuasive designs (anthropomorphic features, explanation facilities, and intervention styles) and studies how they affect users’ knowledge levels, trust perceptions (cognitive, affective), and eventually their acceptance of advice (behavioral trust) and reuse intentions. The research model has been tested in an online experiment and collected 442 valid responses. In general, the findings give empirical support for the proposed research model in the paper. The study contributes to (1) the human-computer interaction literature on the effectiveness of different persuasive design characteristics of intelligent AGS. (2) to traditional decision support systems literature on the mechanism that users use under the persuasive influence of the new type of intelligent AGS (persuasive decision-aid systems). (3) to the trust in automation literature by studying various types of trust toward intelligent AGS and their relationships. (4) to the persuasion literature by incorporating the persuasion knowledge model to understand users’ attitudes and behaviors toward intelligent agents. (5) to the literature on algorithm aversion and algorithm appreciation by resolving the contradictory findings with a holistic theoretical framework. (6) to the anthropomorphism literature by exploring various aspects of anthropomorphism perceptions on trust. The paper also made insightful implications for practice

Persuasion: an analysis and common frame of reference for IS research

Information Systems (IS) researchers persistently examine how Information and Communications Technology (ICT) changes attitudes and behaviours but rarely leverage the persuasion literature when doing so. The hesitance of IS researchers to leverage persuasion literature may be due to this literature’s well-documented complexity. This study aims to reduce the difficulty of understanding and applying persuasion theory within IS research. The study achieves this aim by developing a common frame of reference to help IS researchers to conceptualise persuasion and to conceptually differentiate persuasion from related concepts. In doing this, the study also comprehensively summarises existing research and theory and provides a set of suggestions to guide future IS research into persuasion and behaviour change