Timing And Source Of Online Product Recommendation:the Preference Inconsistency Paradox

Most online retailers employ recommendation agents (RAs) to provide online product recommendations, trying to not only support consumers’decision-making but also influence their decisions of product choice. However, empirical investigations have found that some product recommendations are not well accepted as expected and even cause consumer reactance. While prior studies mainly attribute this to the poor personalization, it might also be caused by providing a recommendation in the wrong way at the wrong time. For one thing, some recommendations without sufficient evidences of the product superiority are perceived as advertisements on behalf of online merchants, and are not persuasive enough to be relied on. Another reason why consumers may ignore recommendations is that the recommendations come when they do not need it, which could mean the recommendation timing is inappropriate.This study seeks to investigate how product evaluations sourced from third parties could be employed in RAs as evidences of the superiority of a recommended product and how product recommendation could be provided to a consumer at the right time, so that it can be accepted and finally chosen during the consumer’s decision-making process. In order to examine the impact of recommendation timing and recommendation source, we leverage the view of Preference Inconsistency Paradox which is based on the conceptual framework of two-stage decision-making: when forming a consideration set at the first stage, a consumer tends to maximize his/her consideration set; when choosing a product from the selected consideration set at the second stage, the consumer’s focus changes to minimizing decision complexity and reaching an easy-to-justify decision. A lab experiment is conducted to verify the influence of two recommendation timing points (i.e., at the beginning of product search and after a choice is made but before confirmation) and two recommendation sources (i.e., from consumers and from experts) on online consumer’s decision process and outcome.The empirical results indicate that recommendation timing and source impact differently on consumers’decision process and outcome. A product recommended at the beginning of product search is more likely to be added into the consideration set and is associated with lower decision difficulty than the one presented after a choice is made but before confirmation. Compared to a product recommended from consumers, the one recommended from experts is more likely to be chosen as the final decision and brings higher decision satisfaction.This study seeks to provide more understandings of online product recommendation and contribute to both literature and practice. Firstly, this study would contribute to recommendation source literature by comparing the effectiveness of two considered third-party supports:consumer recommendations and expert recommendations. Secondly, this study provides insights on the role of recommendation timing in influencing consumer decision-making. Thirdly, this study makes a theoretical contribution to the literature of Preference Inconsistency Paradox by leveraging this paradox in online product recommendation. Furthermore, it provides practical implications by offering guidance in the design of recommendation agent and online retailing websites.