Bothering consumers: When recommendation agents don’t really make our life easier

Abstract

Intelligent systems have been used in different types of websites with the intention of creating personalized messages and understanding consumers’ needs more deeply. They are supposed to facilitate the decision-making process, make internet browsing easier and give users a sense of social feeling and personalization. So far, research in the field has focused attention on the positive aspects of using these systems. Little effort has been made, however, to try to recognize and correct situations in which they do not perform so well. This work is the result of an exploratory research destined to understand the broadness of the concept of failure in personalized environments as well as its antecedents and consequents. Based on the critical incident technique, we collected the opinion of 86 subjects in a multicultural environment and used their responses to elaborate a comprehensive framework of recommendation failure considering the different motivations for Internet use.

Keywords: personalization, online shopping, recommendation agents, recommendation failure.