Digital Nudging with Recommender System...

Modern recommendation systems are decision support systems, which we can find on a variety of websites (e.g., Amazon, Spotify or YouTube). These systems aim to provide users with suitable recommendations based on their needs. This means that recommender systems influence the human behavior in decision-making. The effects that drive this change in behavior can be explained based on insights from different scientific fields (e.g. psychology or human-computer interaction). Thaler and Sunstein explained these effects based on concepts called heuristics and biases, which can be related to the notions of persuasion and nudging. Nudging has been widely studied in traditional decision-making situations but only received some attention in digital environments. The goals for this project are to understand to what extent recommender systems already make use of persuasive effects (nudges) and to measure the persuasive effects of nudging in recommender systems through user studies.