Less is More: Towards Sustainability-Aware Persuasive Explanations in Recommender Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces sustainability-aware persuasive explanations in recommender systems, emphasizing minimalism to support sustainable development goals and analyzing their impact through user studies.

Contribution

It proposes a novel 'less is more' approach to explanations in recommender systems focused on sustainability, which is not addressed by existing methods.

Findings

User acceptance of sustainability-aware explanations is high.

Such explanations can positively influence user behavior towards sustainability.

Promising potential impacts on supporting SDGs.

Abstract

Recommender systems play an important role in supporting the achievement of the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). In recommender systems, explanations can support different goals, such as increasing a user's trust in a recommendation, persuading a user to purchase specific items, or increasing the understanding of the reasons behind a recommendation. In this paper, we discuss the concept of "sustainability-aware persuasive explanations" which we regard as a major concept to support the achievement of the mentioned SDGs. Such explanations are orthogonal to most existing explanation approaches since they focus on a "less is more" principle, which per se is not included in existing e-commerce platforms. Based on a user study in three item domains, we analyze the potential impacts of sustainability-aware persuasive explanations. The study results are promising regarding user acceptance and the potential impacts of such explanations.