Exploring Determinants of Intention to Adopt Information of Recommendation Agents as Shopping Decision Aids And Unplanned Purchase Behaviors---Moderating Effects of Herd Behavior And User Involvement

Online recommendation agents can assist users in coping with problems from information overload and information search complexity, so as to improve users’ decision quality. We think that “information” is the fundamental element of recommendation agents. Most literatures proposed several antecedents for building users’ trust and information usefulness toward online recommendation agents from a rational consideration, which could increase uses’ intention of reusing recommendation agents. Although most literatures focus on exploring intention to reuse recommendation agents, we think that persuading users into take suggestions for making decision should be the main objective of recommendation agents. Users could treat recommendation agents as an actual agent for decision making, rather than an instrument for filtering information. Empirical studies show that enjoyment and playfulness, which users perceived during interactive process, are critical to conducting 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. Accordingly, this study investigate the influences of utilitarian and hedonic factors on intention to adopt information as decision aids and antecedents of utilitarian and hedonic factors from perspectives of accessibility-diagnosticity model and atmospherics. Most literatures show the influence of user’s domain knowledge about products, shopping goals, and product type on the association of users’ intention to reuse and its determinants. However, we think users’ involvement in using recommendation agents is worth being further investigated. Users’ motives and attitudes towards using RAs could influence their interests regarding features which they think recommendation agents should be provided with. Furthermore, literatures related recommendation agents almost assume that users perform planned behavior after comprehensively deliberating information beforehand. But, users often perform impulse buying/unplanned purchase behavior in both real and virtual worlds. They often change their mind at the pint-to-purchase and spontaneously buy some product which is different from what they plan to buy. Hence this study considers both planned and unplanned behavior and explores determinant factors which let users switch to unplanned purchase from planned purchase at the point-to-purchase.

Project ID:PB10106-0243
External Project ID:NSC101-2410-H182-002