Looks Can Be Deceiving: Linking User-Item Interactions and User's Propensity Towards Multi-Objective Recommendations

TL;DR

This study investigates how user interactions and self-reported preferences influence multi-objective recommender systems, revealing that early exposure to diverse recommendations impacts long-term satisfaction and acceptance.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into user behavior in multi-objective recommendations and suggests design improvements for better user understanding and acceptance.

Findings

MORS recommendations attract fewer selections but are crucial early on.

User self-proclaimed willingness to engage with novelty often doesn't match actual acceptance.

Including explanatory elements can improve user acceptance of diverse recommendations.

Abstract

Multi-objective recommender systems (MORS) provide suggestions to users according to multiple (and possibly conflicting) goals. When a system optimizes its results at the individual-user level, it tailors them on a user's propensity towards the different objectives. Hence, the capability to understand users' fine-grained needs towards each goal is crucial. In this paper, we present the results of a user study in which we monitored the way users interacted with recommended items, as well as their self-proclaimed propensities towards relevance, novelty and diversity objectives. The study was divided into several sessions, where users evaluated recommendation lists originating from a relevance-only single-objective baseline as well as MORS. We show that despite MORS-based recommendations attracted less selections, its presence in the early sessions is crucial for users' satisfaction in the later stages. Surprisingly, the self-proclaimed willingness of users to interact with novel and diverse items is not always reflected in the recommendations they accept. Post-study questionnaires provide insights on how to deal with this matter, suggesting that MORS-based results should be accompanied by elements that allow users to understand the recommendations, so as to facilitate their acceptance.