Persuasive Recommendations in Ubiquitous Environments

Recommender Systems have been traditionally utilized in online environments to personalize product and service offerings and can contribute towards the persuasion of a user to select or consume the recommended items. The present study examines the aforementioned systems in ubiquitous environments and focuses on the persuasive role of customer’s motivational conditions to consume a product as well as factors affecting consumers’ acceptance in recommendation systems. One of the main insights of the study demonstrates that when a consumer has low motivation to purchase an item then (s)he has the intention to purchase more garments than in the case of high motivation to purchase a particular garment. Furthermore, the present study examines and evaluates the effect of novel and serendipitous recommendations on the above motivational conditions. The results revealed that when a consumer has either high or low motivation to purchase a garment, (s)he gets persuaded by serendipitous garment recommendations while the provision of novel recommendations does not affect the acceptance of recommendations in any of the two motivational conditions.