Effects of Anthropomorphic Interfaces vs. Explanation Facilities on Trust in Online Recommendation Agents: An Elaboration Likelihood Model Perspective

Description

As organizations are increasingly utilizing web-based technologies to better support customers, the persuasive power of technologies has emerged as a critical issue to increase the effectiveness of technologies and retain consumers in online environments. This project focuses on trust in online recommendation agents (RAs), which elicit users’ preferences and facilitate users’ decision making by providing shopping advice. To explore the persuasive power of RAs, the researchers will examine the impact of two technological capabilities (i.e., anthropomorphic interfaces and explanation facilities) on users’ trust in RAs. Drawing on the elaboration likelihood model literature, this project takes a perspective that the formation of trust towards an RA can be regarded as a persuasion process and explores the conditions under which one capability will be more influential than the other during the persuasion process.This research aims at building a theory of trust-building in an emerging domain of online decision support technology and RAs in particular. RA designs that can enhance users’ trust will be investigated. The results of this research will reveal the effect mechanisms of different technological capabilities on users’ trust in RAs and provide practitioners with guidelines for designing trustworthy web-based decision support technologies.