The Influence of Social Presence on Evaluating Personalized Recommender Systems

Providing recommendations is acknowledged as one of important features of a business-to-consumer online storefront. Though there have been many studies on algorithms and operational procedures of personalized recommender systems, there is still a lack of empirical evidence demonstrating relationships between social presence and two important outcome variables of recommender systems: reuse intention and trust. To test the existence of a causal link between social presence and reuse intention, and mediating role of trust between these two variables, this study performed experiments varying level of social presence while providing personalized recommendations to users based on their explicit preferences. This study also compared these effects in two different product contexts: hedonic and utilitarian product. The results show that the provision of higher social presence increases both the reuse intention and trust of the recommender systems. In addition, the influence of social presence on reuse intention in the setting of recommending utilitarian products is less than that in the setting of recommending hedonic products.