The 2021 SIGIR Workshop On eCommerce

Preventing Contrast Effect Exploitation in Recommendations

Chris Nota, Georgios Theocharous, Michelle Saad, Philip S. Thomas

Read Research Paper

Contrast effects are caused by the tendency for mental evaluations of objects to be influenced by one or more contrasting objects. As this cognitive bias can unduly influence users’ behavior, we present a method for preventing recommender systems from exploiting contrast effects. We then apply our method to a simulated online storefront and show that it is able to prevent contrast effect exploitation while maximizing the conversion rate of users.