Investigating the Decision-Making Behavior of Maximizers and Satisficers in the Presence of Recommendations

Psychological theory distinguishes between maximizing and satisficing decision-making styles. Maximizers tend to explore more or all alternatives when making a choice, while satisficers evaluate options until they find one that is good enough. There is limited research that examines how the existence of a recommender influences the choice process and decisions of different types of decision-makers. We report the results of a controlled study, in which we monitored the choice process of participants when provided with automated recommendations and different types of additional information regarding available options. Our analyses show that none of the differences that were expected based on the literature manifested itself in the experiment. Maximizers neither inspected more items, nor invested more time to study them. Instead, like satisficers, they mostly picked one of the top-ranked items recommended by the system, which emphasizes the value of recommenders in particular for maximizers, who would otherwise face a more challenging decision problem. The analysis of the preferences of participants over different types of additional information revealed that highlighting key pros and cons was perceived as particularly helpful for the maximizers, an insight that can be used for the design of explanation approaches for recommenders.