Recommendation Agents for Electronic Commerce: Effects of Explanation Facilities on Trusting Beliefs

Information and Operations Management Department, Marshall School of Engineering Seminarby Dr. Izak BenbasatDepartment of Information Technology Management, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, CanadaABSTRACT: We empirically test the effects of explanation facilities on consumers' initial trusting beliefs concerning online recommendation agents (RAs). RAs provide online shopping advice based on user-specified needs and preferences. The characteristics of RAs that may hamper consumers' trust building in the RAs are identified, and the provision of explanation facilities is proposed as a knowledge-based approach to enhance consumers' trusting beliefs by dealing with these obstacles. This study examines the effects of three types of explanations about an RA and its use – how, why, and trade-off explanations – on consumers' trusting belief in an RA's competence, benevolence, and integrity.An RA was built as the experimental platform and a laboratory experiment was conducted. The results confirm the important role of explanation facilities in enhancing consumer' initial trusting beliefs and indicate that consumers' use of different types of explanations enhances different trusting beliefs: the use of how explanations increases their competence and benevolence beliefs, the use of why explanations increases their benevolence beliefs, and the use of trade-off explanations increases their integrity beliefs.KEYWORDS AND PHASES: Trust, Recommendation Agents, Decision Support, Explanations, Decisional Guidance, Electronic Commerce-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Dr. Izak Benbasat, Fellow, Royal Society of Canada, is CANADA Research Chair in Information Technology Management at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Benbasat is the past editor-in-chief of Information Systems Research and currently a Senior Editor of the Journal of the Association for Information Systems. He is a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems. His current research interests include designing and evaluating human-computer interfaces for e-business.Friday, September 29, 2006, Hoffman Hall 302, 1:30 – 3:00 pm

Location: Hoffman Hall 302

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Georgia Lum