Walking the Middle Path: How Medium Trade-off Exposure Leads to Higher Consumer Satisfaction in Recommender Agents

Recommender Agents (RAs) facilitate consumers’ online purchase decisions for complex, multi-attribute products. As not all combinations of attribute levels can be obtained, users are forced into trade-offs. The exposure of trade-offs in a RA has been found to affect consumers’ perceptions. However, little is known about how different preference elicitation methods in RAs affect consumers by varying degrees of trade-off exposure. We propose a research model that investigates how different levels of trade-off exposure cognitively and affectively influence consumers’ satisfaction with RAs. We operationalize these levels in three different RA types and test our hypotheses in a laboratory experiment with 116 participants. Our results indicate that with increasing tradeoff exposure, perceived enjoyment and perceived control follow an inverted Ushaped relationship. Hence, RAs using preference elicitation methods with medium trade-off exposure yield highest consumer satisfaction. This contributes to the understanding of trade-offs in RAs and provides valuable implications to e-commerce practitioners.