Investigating the Role of Personality Traits and Influence Strategies on the Persuasive Effect of Personalized Recommendations

Recommender systems provide suggestions for products, services, or information that match users’ interests and/or needs. However, not all recommendations persuade users to select or use the recommended item. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) suggests that individuals with low motivation or ability to process the information provided with a recommended item could eventually get persuaded to select/use the item if appropriate peripheral cues enrich the recommendation. The purpose of this research is to investigate the persuasive effect of certain influence strategies and the role of personality in the acceptance of recommendations. In the present study, a movie Recommender System was developed in order to empirically investigate the aforementioned questions applying certain persuasive strategies in the form of textual messages alongside the recommended item. The statistical method of Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) was used for data analysis and the results revealed that motivating messages do change users’ acceptance of the recommender item but not unconditionally since user’s personality differentiates the effect of the persuasive strategies.