Consumers' Interest in Personalized Recommendations: The Role of Product-Involvement and Opinion Seeking

The best recommender system is useless if consumers are not interested in its recommendations. Hence it is vital for e-commerce operators who apply recommender systems to get insights into the drivers of interest in personalized recommendations. This paper combines IS research and marketing research as it applies the theory of opinion seeking in order to investigate the influence of product involvement and opinion seeking on the interest of consumers in getting suggestions and reviews by recommender systems. The findings indicate that product involvement shows a considerable impact on opinion seeking tendency. Furthermore, opinion seeking tendency shows a significant influence on interest in receiving other users' product reviews and personalized recommendations. The results imply that different kinds of output data of a recommender system supplement each other. Furthermore, as opinion seeking tendency is related to the product category, recommender systems are faced with varying target groups, depending on the product offerings