Double Agents : Assessing the Role of Electronic Product-Recommendation Systems

Electronic information can easily overwhelm people. Software tools have been introduced to assist humans in filtering and organizing information into more digestible amounts and formats. Many of these tools are altruistic in the sense that they have no vested interest in what the user does with the information. However, some are designed not only to assist buyers but also to steer them in a particular direction. This makes them double agents. Examples of such decision aids exist at a number of vendor sites and include Amazon.com's Your Store, GMs Auto Choice Advisor and IBMs Solution Profiler. This article reviews the research on electronic recommendation agents. It focuses on tools that provide online shoppers with personalized product recommendations and explores the benefits and potential difficulties consumers may experience when using such tools. The article concludes that having a consumer-centric double-agent perspective can lead to a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the interaction between electronic product-recommendation agents and consumers. This, in turn, can spur the design of better and more effective recommendation tools that allow consumers to speed up their decision processes and improve the quality of the choices they make.