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 language | English |
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| Publication status | Published - 2011 |
| Event | 15th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems: Quality Research in Pacific, PACIS 2011 - Brisbane, QLD, Australia Duration: 7 Jul 2011 → 11 Jul 2011 |
Conference
| Conference | 15th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems: Quality Research in Pacific, PACIS 2011 |
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| Country/Territory | Australia |
| City | Brisbane, QLD |
| Period | 7/07/11 → 11/07/11 |