The Immunity of Users' Item Selection from Serial Position Effects in Multi-Attribute Item Recommendation Scenarios

Serial position effects are triggered in recommendation scenarios where users focus on evaluating items shown at the beginning and at the end of a list. In this paper, we analyze these effects in the context of multi-attribute item recommendation scenarios where the recommended items are presented to users in the form of a list of relevant attributes. We conducted a user study in different item domains to examine if the item selection of users is affected by the order of the attributes of the recommended items presented to them. The experimental results show that the order of the attributes does not affect users’ item selection. When selecting a recommended item, users tend to focus on evaluating the value of the attributes that reflect their preferences for the desired item but do not care about the order of the attributes. This finding brings us to a conclusion that in the context of multi-attribute item recommendation scenarios, the selection of a recommended item from a list of candidate items is immune to serial position effects.