PSYREC: Psychological Concepts to Enhance the Interaction with Recommender Systems

Although recommender systems are already a successful part of many online systems, there are still areas of research which are unexploited. One of them is the appropriate consideration of psychological theories which could be beneficial for the interaction between a computerized system and an online consumer, particularly in the financial services sector. This paper emphasizes the potentials of integrating psychological knowledge into the further development of recommender systems on the basis of psychological theories and basic decision processes. The enumerated concepts have been demonstrated to be influential in consumer buying behaviour in numerous studies and therefore are used as a theoretical basis of the presented work. A conceptual framework is build upon the technology acceptance model (TAM) which offers the possibility of integrating psychological knowledge in the further development of online financial services. Possible applications and implementations are shown on the basis of empirical work that has been carried out in the past years.