The Informational Role of Online Recommendations: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Guy Aridor, Duarte Gonçalves, Daniel Kluver, Ruoyan Kong and Joseph Konstan

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We conduct a field experiment on a movie-recommendation platform to investigate whether and how online recommendations influence consumption choices. Using a within-subjects design, our experiment measures the causal effect of recommendations on consumption and decomposes the relative importance of two economic mechanisms: expanding consumers' consideration sets and providing information about their idiosyncratic match value. We find that the informational component exerts a stronger influence - recommendations shape consumer beliefs, which in turn drive consumption, particularly among less experienced consumers. Our findings and experimental design provide valuable insights for the economic evaluation and optimisation of online recommendation systems.

Date: 2022-11, Revised 2024-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-mkt and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.14219 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Informational Role of Online Recommendations: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2211.14219

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().