An Exploratory Study on the Outcomes of Influence Stra- tegies in Mobile Application Recommendations

The rapid growth in the mobile application market presents a significant challenge to find interesting and relevant applications for users. Recommendation systems deal with ends such as movies and consumer goods that are consumed by users where similarity between consumer tastes is generally taken into account. On the other hand, recommendation systems for mobile applications differ from traditional systems in terms of the characteristics of the ends they recommend. They present applications that are not just the ends for consumption but also means to reach various ends. In almost all application stores mobile applications are grouped under headings that employ consensus or authority influence strategies such as the most popular, most downloaded, editor’s choice or applications of the day. However in the literature, there is limited information about the users’ perception of such influence strategies and underlying factors that lie beyond the users’ preferences. The traditional persuasion literature suggests that people are more likely to accept recommendations when the sources display persuasive messages during the interaction. However the effect of visibility modality in the display has not been extensively studied. The effects of visible and semi-visible persuasive messages are analyzed and compared in this study. The users’ compliance with persuasive messages in the mobile application recommendation domain is examined. The question of how the persuadability of users affects their compliance is further explored.