Sponsored vs. Organic (Research Paper) Recommendations and the Impact of Labeling

In this paper we show that organic recommendations are preferred over commercial recommendations even when they point to the same freely downloadable research papers. Simply the fact that users perceive recommendations as commercial decreased their willingness to accept them. It is further shown that the exact labeling of recommendations matters. For instance, recommendations labeled as ‘advertisement’ performed worse than those labeled as ‘sponsored’. Similarly, recommendations labeled as ‘Free Research Papers’ performed better than those labeled as ‘Research Papers’. However, whatever the differences between the labels were – the best performing recommendations were those with no label at all.