1. Understanding choice overload in recommender systems
- Author
-
Bart P. Knijnenburg, Dirk Bollen, Martijn C. Willemsen, Mark P. Graus, and Human Technology Interaction
- Subjects
Attractiveness ,Information retrieval ,Computer science ,media_common.quotation_subject ,02 engineering and technology ,Recommender system ,computer.software_genre ,MovieLens ,Information overload ,Task (project management) ,020204 information systems ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,020201 artificial intelligence & image processing ,Quality (business) ,Data mining ,User interface ,Set (psychology) ,computer ,media_common - Abstract
Even though people are attracted by large, high quality recommendation sets, psychological research on choice overload shows that choosing an item from recommendation sets containing many attractive items can be a very difficult task. A web-based user experiment using a matrix factorization algorithm applied to the MovieLens dataset was used to investigate the effect of recommendation set size (5 or 20 items) and set quality (low or high) on perceived variety, recommendation set attractiveness, choice difficulty and satisfaction with the chosen item. The results show that larger sets containing only good items do not necessarily result in higher choice satisfaction compared to smaller sets, as the increased recommendation set attractiveness is counteracted by the increased difficulty of choosing from these sets. These findings were supported by behavioral measurements revealing intensified information search and increased acquisition times for these large attractive sets. Important implications of these findings for the design of recommender system user interfaces will be discussed.
- Published
- 2010