The effects of malfunctioning personalized services on users' trust and behaviors

Patrick Y.K. Chau, Shuk Ying Ho, Yihong Yao

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Online merchants adopt web personalization to customize web content to match online users' needs. Prior research has only looked at the "success" side of web personalization. Little research examines the "problematic" side of web personalization. The objective of this research is to explore how "malfunctioning" personalized web services influence an online user's trust in the personalization agent and the behavioral intention of that user. In particular, this research looks at two types of malfunctioning personalization: irrelevant recommendations and biased recommendations. We draw on trust theories to develop seven hypotheses to predict the effects of malfunctioning personalized web services. We conducted a study with a personalized music download website. We found that irrelevant recommendations led to low trust in the personalization agent's competence and integrity, and biased recommendations led to low trust in the integrity of the personalization agent. These findings provide empirical evidence of the possible problems of malfunctioning personalization and help firms understand and quantify the challenges and limitations of incorporating web personalization in their websites.

Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 2011
Externally publishedYes
Event15th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems: Quality Research in Pacific, PACIS 2011 - Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Duration: 7 Jul 201111 Jul 2011

Conference

Conference15th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems: Quality Research in Pacific, PACIS 2011
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityBrisbane, QLD
Period7/07/1111/07/11

Keywords

  • Malfunctioning personalization
  • Recommendations
  • Trust
  • Web personalization

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Information Systems

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The effects of malfunctioning personalized services on users' trust and behaviors'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this