Friend or foe: Do online recommender tools really improve decision making?
Published 29 November, 2021
The researchers conducted two experiments using Jingdong and Taobao, the two biggest online shopping platforms in China. According to author Jian Mou, of Korea’s Pusan National University, “we found that AI recommendation augmented the information cocoon effect. In other words, people see what they want to see, and then the website’s AI recommender algorithm selects content for them based on those preferences. This negatively impacts the quality of the customer’s purchasing decisions.”