Interesting Results
Recommendations Agents Influence Choices
It’s not surprising that the recommendations agents available on many Web sites influence what brands or models consumers choose, but a recent study shows that they also influence what criteria people consider when making choices. A series of experiments showed that brands or models that perform well on criteria that are used by recommendations agents are disproportionately likely to be selected even if information is available on other attributes that are described by the buyer as equally important and the brand or model selected doesn’t perform as well on those other important attributes. This effect was most pronounced when people were told that the criteria used by the recommendations agents were selected based on their importance and when brands varied in terms of their relative performance on different criteria (so a brand that performed best relative to one criteria would perform less well on others and no brand performed well or poorly on all criteria).