Towards Greener Choices: Decision Information Nudging for Sustainability-Aware Recommender Explanations

Recommender systems (RS) can support sustainable development by steering users toward more sustainable choices. Sustainability-aware explanations represent one avenue for contributing to this goal by foregrounding the environmental and social aspects of the recommended products or services. This paper advances the line of research on sustainability-aware explanations by integrating nudging mechanisms into their design and by evaluating their effectiveness through a randomized between-subjects online vignette experiment across two item domains (). Our findings offer actionable design guidelines for building RS that foster sustainability-aware decision making and enrich the empirical foundation for impact-oriented research on explanation in RS.