A Study on Determinants and Moderating Factors of Building Intention to Reuse Recommendation Agents and Adopt Information as Shopping Decision Aids---The Perspective of Flow Theory

Users could utilize online recommendation agents for making purchase decisions and improve their decision quality, since online recommendation agents could assist users with lowering information overload and search complexity. Most literatures proposed several antecedents for building users’ trust and information usefulness toward online recommendation agents from a rational consideration. Empirical studies also showed that perceived enjoyment and playfulness increase users’ intention to reuse. Researchers indicates that perceived enjoyment are critical to conduct online activities, such as online shopping, information searching, online chatting, online game, etc. Yet, little researches address the issue of how to raise users’ enjoyment and playfulness during interacting with online recommendation agents. Besides, most literatures focus on increasing intention to reuse online recommendation agents. However, persuading users into take suggestions for making decision should be the main objective of recommendation agents, especially for e-tailers. Users could treat recommendation agents as an actual agent for decision making, rather than an instrument for filtering information. E-tailers could get more benefits from users’ intention to adopt as decision aids. Accordingly, we propose two-year project for addressing these two important issues. In the first year, this study investigates the determinants of flow experience formation during the process of using recommendation agents. Users perceived flow experience will have positive attitude toward recommendation agents and then are willing to reuse recommendation agents. From the flow theory, high balance of skills and challenges is very important to induce users’ flow experience, especially conducting online task-oriented activities, such as using recommendation agents. Accordingly, this study proposes three mechanisms for reducing challenge when using recommendation agents for making purchasing decision, including explanation facilities, consumer reviews and perceived process similarity. The effects of three mechanisms will vary with the degrees of users’ domain knowledge. In the second year, this study investigates the relationship of intention to reuse and intention to adopt as decision aids. This study proposes two information cues which could move users from the stage of “intention to reuse” to of “intention to adopt as decision aids” based on information cascade theory and results in the first year. Effects of these two information cues, including information cascade and perceived outcome similarity, will vary with the extent of uses’ domain knowledge. This study will conduct laboratory experiments with factorial design for data collection and will propose theoretical and managerial implications based on results of data analysis.

Project ID:PB10007-1218
External Project ID:NSC100-2410-H182-005