research-article

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

Authors:

Gediminas Adomavicius,

Jesse Bockstedt,

Jingjing ZhangAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), Volume 39, Issue 2

Article No.: 13, Pages 1 - 38

https://doi.org/10.1145/3430028

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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Index Terms

Effects of Personalized and Aggregate Top-N Recommendation Lists on User Preference Ratings
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Evaluation of retrieval results
      1. Presentation of retrieval results
    2. Retrieval tasks and goals
      1. Recommender systems

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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

Editor:
Min Zhang
Tsinghua University, China

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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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Mousavi NAdamopoulos PBockstedt J(2023)The Decoy Effect and Recommendation SystemsInformation Systems Research10.1287/isre.2022.119734:4(1533-1553)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/isre.2022.1197
Zhang SJiang TKuang KFeng FYu JMa JZhao ZZhu JYang HChua TWu F(2023)SLED: Structure Learning based Denoising for RecommendationACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/361138542:2(1-31)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611385
Cai DQian SFang QHu JXu C(2023)User Cold-Start Recommendation via Inductive Heterogeneous Graph Neural NetworkACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/356048741:3(1-27)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3560487
Wu HLong JLi NYu DNg M(2022)Adversarial Auto-encoder Domain Adaptation for Cold-start Recommendation with Positive and Negative HypergraphsACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/354410541:2(1-25)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544105
Afchar DMelchiorre ASchedl MHennequin REpure EMoussallam M(2022)Explainability in music recommender systemsAI Magazine10.1002/aaai.1205643:2(190-208)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/aaai.12056
Adomavicius GBockstedt JCurley SZhang J(2022)Recommender systems, ground truth, and preference pollutionAI Magazine10.1002/aaai.1205543:2(177-189)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/aaai.12055
Sonboli NBurke REkstrand MMehrotra R(2022)The multisided complexity of fairness in recommender systemsAI Magazine10.1002/aaai.1205443:2(164-176)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/aaai.12054

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