Product recommendation agents (RAs) assist online firms to adapt their suggested offers to users’ preferences, thereby lowering users’ decision effort. The concept of effort is central in decision-making, yet it remains unclear whether it should be regarded as a cost or as a benefit improving the odds of a better decision. Building on Social Exchange theory, we suggest that interactions between users and RAs are driven by the concepts of perceived interdependence and reciprocity. We suggest that perceived user effort decreases the perceived RA quality, whereas RA effort increases the perceived RA quality. We conducted two experimental studies across different contexts. We found that users evaluate RAs based on their own expended effort, in relation to how much effort they perceived the RA has put into the process of generating recommendations. Such an effect is attenuated by users’ familiarity with the product context. Our findings offer important insights into how online firms can improve the use of their RAs.

产品推荐代理 (RA) 帮助在线公司根据用户的偏好调整他们的建议报价，从而降低用户的决策努力。努力的概念是决策的核心，但目前尚不清楚是否应将其视为成本或收益以提高做出更好决策的几率。基于社会交换理论，我们建议用户和 RA 之间的交互是由感知的相互依赖和互惠的概念驱动的。我们建议感知用户努力降低感知 RA 质量，而 RA 努力增加感知 RA 质量。我们在不同的背景下进行了两项实验研究。我们发现用户根据他们自己花费的努力来评估 RA，这与他们认为 RA 在生成推荐过程中投入的努力有关。用户对产品上下文的熟悉程度会减弱这种影响。我们的发现为在线公司如何改进其 RA 的使用提供了重要的见解。