Psychology reactance to online recommendations: The influence of time pressure

Abstract

Recommendation systems in ecommerce may cause psychological reactance under some circumstances, which does harm to the consumers' acceptance to recommendations and even the satisfaction to the whole website. In combination with the theory of forced exposure and manipulative intent, we performed an experimental study to analyze the psychological reactance to online recommendations as well as the influence of time pressure. The result of our empirical research reveals that time pressure may influence the forced exposure and manipulative intent, and further act on the acceptance of recommendations. Our findings have implications to the online shops about how to plan recommendation services in an appropriate way, to reduce the customers' reactance and eventually to achieve a win-win result of improving both shopping experience and business performance.