Research Note—The Influence of Trade-off Difficulty Caused by Preference Elicitation Methods on User Acceptance of Recommendation Agents Across Loss and Gain Conditions

Prior studies on product recommendation agents (RAs) have been based on the effort-accuracy perspective in which the amount of effort required to make a decision and the accuracy of such decisions are two dominant antecedents of user acceptance of RAs. The current study extends the effort-accuracy perspective by considering trade-off difficulty, a type of negative emotion that arises when attainment of one's goals is blocked by the attainment of other goals; consequently, one must make trade-offs among the conflicting goals. Many product purchase choices for which RAs are used require users to make trade-offs among conflicting product attributes. A key feature of RAs, the preference elicitation method (PEM), often compels users to make explicit trade-offs. We examine whether an RA's PEM generates trade-off difficulty, which, in turn, affects users' evaluations (i.e., perceived amount of effort and perceived accuracy of recommendations) and the resultant acceptance of the RA. Trade-off difficulty influences users' evaluations of an RA via perceived control over execution of the RA PEM. In addition, the decision context in which users employ a PEM moderates the degree to which that PEM generates trade-off difficulty. Specifically, a PEM generates a greater degree of trade-off difficulty in a choice context that leads to a loss than in a choice context that leads to a gain. Consequently, users exert more effort to cope with trade-off difficulty in a loss condition. Because users voluntarily spend more effort, the negative influence of perceived effort on users' acceptance of an RA—which is supported in prior studies—decreases in a loss condition. A laboratory experiment was conducted using two between-subject factors: two RAs, one that employed a trade-off-compelling PEM and the other a trade-off-hiding PEM, and two decision contexts, one of which was a loss condition and the other a gain condition. The results supported all of the hypotheses.