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Less is More: Towards Sustainability-Aware Persuasive Explanations in Recommender Systems

Published: 08 October 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Recommender systems play an important role in supporting the achievement of the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). In recommender systems, explanations can support different goals, such as increasing a user’s trust in a recommendation, persuading a user to purchase specific items, or increasing the understanding of the reasons behind a recommendation. In this paper, we discuss the concept of "sustainability-aware persuasive explanations" which we regard as a major concept to support the achievement of the mentioned SDGs. Such explanations are orthogonal to most existing explanation approaches since they focus on a "less is more" principle, which per se is not included in existing e-commerce platforms. Based on a user study in three item domains, we analyze the potential impacts of sustainability-aware persuasive explanations. The study results are promising regarding user acceptance and the potential impacts of such explanations.

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cover image ACM Conferences
RecSys '24: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
October 2024
1438 pages
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Published: 08 October 2024

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  1. Explanations
  2. Recommender Systems
  3. Sustainability

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