Abstract：
Digital platforms commonly ask customers to select interest categories (e.g., genres/topics) as input for personalized recommendations. Twelve main studies and two pilot studies (total N = 8,824) reveal that customers share less diverse preferences with algorithms (versus human curators or when merely listing preferences for themselves); they focus on core preferences while omitting tangential ones, a phenomenon termed preference filtering. It is driven by customers’ expectation that algorithms weigh their preferences more uniformly than human curators (i.e., expected uniformity). A mathematical model, as well as interviews and a survey with practitioners show that preference filtering appears rational ex ante yet leads to negative consequences for both customers and firms ex post. The authors examine key design dimensions of the preference elicitation task—when preferences are elicited, how customers articulate them, what purpose is made salient, and who customers believe they are interacting with—that determine the extent to which customers engage in preference filtering. Two studies on self-developed video-streaming websites show that alleviating preference filtering can boost engagement and enhance customer reviews of recommendation services. These findings offer valuable insights for firms that rely on algorithms to engage customers.
Journal of Marketing
source: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4585195
About author：
Phyliss Jia Gai is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. She studies consumer behavior, with particular interests in digital consumption, moral judgement and decision-making, and self-regulation. Her research has been published in the top marketing journals such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Before she joins Guanghua, she obtained her PhD degree in marketing from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in the Netherlands. She also holds a master degree in social sciences from the University of Chicago and a bachelor degree in Psychology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. For her latest research, see www.phylissgai.com