Toward Deep Understanding of Persuasive Product Recommendation Agents

Product recommendation agents (PRA) are systems built to facilitate customers’ products purchase on e-commerce websites. Prior literature focuses on the “shaping” effects of PRA to customers’ decision making. More challengingly, PRA can be built to change customers’ product choice by combining with persuasive features. This paper explores this new type of PRA “persuasive product recommendation agents” (PPRA). In this paper, we make a distinction of PPRA with neutral and deceptive ones. The basic functioning principle of PPRA is stated and a classification of persuasive tactics is made. We propose the mechanism via which PPRA work by incorporating elaboration likelihood model, 4w and theory of reasoned action together. Despite marketing usage, the proposed PPRA can be used to benefit society by promoting green purchases or encouraging charity. The theory also has the generalizability to be used in decision making contexts like healthcare and education. Discussion and future research directions are made.