Online product recommendations have been shown to influence consumers’ preferences and purchasing behaviors for recommended products. However, it remains an open empirical question whether and how recommendations of other products affect a consumer’s economic behavior for a focal product. In many e-commerce websites, a product is presented with co-purchase and co-view recommendations, which potentially contain complementary and substitutable products, respectively. Very little research has explored differential effects of recommending complementary and substitutable products. In this study, we explore how types of other recommended products impact consumers’ willingness to pay for a focal product through interactions with prices of recommended products and consumers’ decision stages. We conducted a 2³ randomized factorial experiment as well as two 2 × 2 experiments to examine these issues. Experimental results provide evidence that there is a significant interaction effect between the recommendation type and decision stage, which highlights the importance of recommendation timing on e-commerce platforms. Furthermore, it also illustrates that the effect of recommending complementary vs. substitutable products is subject to contextual factors such as consumers’ decision stages. Results of our study have significant implications for the design and application of online recommender systems.

在线产品推荐已显示出会影响消费者对推荐产品的偏好和购买行为。但是，仍然存在一个开放的经验性问题，即其他产品的推荐是否以及如何影响消费者对焦点产品的经济行为。在许多电子商务网站中，会向产品展示共同购买和共同浏览建议，这些建议可能分别包含互补产品和可替代产品。很少有研究探讨推荐互补和可替代产品的不同效果。在本研究中，我们探讨了其他推荐产品的类型如何通过与推荐产品的价格和消费者决策阶段的相互作用来影响消费者购买重点产品的意愿。我们进行了2 ³随机阶乘实验以及两个2×2实验来研究这些问题。实验结果提供了证据，表明推荐类型和决策阶段之间存在显着的交互作用，这突出了推荐时间在电子商务平台上的重要性。此外，它还说明，推荐互补产品和可替代产品的效果受上下文因素（例如消费者的决策阶段）的影响。我们的研究结果对在线推荐系统的设计和应用具有重要意义。