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Effects of Personalized and Aggregate Top-N Recommendation Lists on User Preference Ratings

Published: 14 January 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Prior research has shown a robust effect of personalized product recommendations on user preference judgments for items. Specifically, the display of system-predicted preference ratings as item recommendations has been shown in multiple studies to bias users’ preference ratings after item consumption in the direction of the predicted rating. Top-N lists represent another common approach for presenting item recommendations in recommender systems. Through three controlled laboratory experiments, we show that top-N lists do not induce a discernible bias in user preference judgments. This result is robust, holding for both lists of personalized item recommendations and lists of items that are top-rated based on averages of aggregate user ratings. Adding numerical ratings to the list items does generate a bias, consistent with earlier studies. Thus, in contexts where preference biases are of concern to an online retailer or platform, top-N lists, without numerical predicted ratings, would be a promising format for displaying item recommendations.

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      cover image ACM Transactions on Information Systems
      ACM Transactions on Information Systems  Volume 39, Issue 2
      April 2021
      391 pages
      ISSN:1046-8188
      EISSN:1558-2868
      DOI:10.1145/3444752
      Issue’s Table of Contents
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      Publication History

      Published: 14 January 2021
      Accepted: 01 October 2020
      Revised: 01 August 2020
      Received: 01 March 2020
      Published in TOIS Volume 39, Issue 2

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      1. Recommender systems
      2. decision biases
      3. personalization
      4. top-N recommendations
      5. user preferences

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