The Effect of Context-Aware Recommendations on Customer Purchasing Behavior and Trust

Despite the growing popularity of Context-Aware Recommender Systems (CARSs), only limited work has been done on how contextual recommendations affect the behavior of customers in real-life settings. In this paper, we study the effects of contextual recommendations on the purchasing behavior of customers and their trust in the provided recommendations. In particular, we did live controlled experiments with real customers of a major commercial Italian retailer in which we compared the customers' purchasing behavior and measured their trust in the provided recommendations across the contextual, content-based and random recommendations. As a part of this study, we have investigated the role of accuracy and diversity of recommendations on customers' behavior and their trust in the provided recommendations for the three types of RSes. We have demonstrated that the context-aware RS outperformed the other two RSes in terms of accuracy, trust and other economics-based performance metrics across most of our experimental settings.