Search Strategies in Shopping Engines: An Experimental Investigation

Shopping engines of different designs were researched in respect to convenience as a mode of access to goods and services offered on the Web. Some shopping engines function autonomously in one stage, quickly maximizing decision accuracy as a function of several parameters. Others strongly involve the user, searching in multiple stages to satisfy decision accuracy requirements. Single-stage and multiple-stage shopping engines designed with two approaches, QuickSearch and AdaptiveSearch, were tested on 205 users trying to attain maximal accuracy with minimal effort. The best-performing shopping engine used two stages, QuickSearch first, then AdaptiveSearch. The results imply that QuickSearch and AdaptiveSearch, although logically equivalent, have different impacts on shopping for differentiated, multi-attribute goods and services. This suggests that shopping engines should be designed to first save the shopper effort and then provide attribute-focused support for examining the resulting set of items.

[1]  Izak Benbasat,et al.  Evaluating the Impact of DSS, Cognitive Effort, and Incentives on Strategy Selection , 1999, Inf. Syst. Res..

[2]  Matthew K. O. Lee,et al.  A Trust Model for Consumer Internet Shopping , 2001, Int. J. Electron. Commer..

[3]  Erik Brynjolfsson,et al.  Frictionless Commerce? A Comparison of Internet and Conventional Retailers , 2000 .

[4]  Markus Stolze,et al.  Soft navigation in electronic product catalogs , 2000, International Journal on Digital Libraries.

[5]  I. Benbasat,et al.  The Influence of Decision Aids on Choice Strategies: An Experimental Analysis of the Role of Cognitive Effort , 1994 .

[6]  Sandeep Purao,et al.  Supporting decision making in combinatorially explosive multicriteria situations , 1999, Decis. Support Syst..

[7]  Rajiv Kohli,et al.  E-loyalty: elusive ideal or competitive edge? , 2003, CACM.

[8]  Robert H. Guttman,et al.  Agents that Buy and Sell: Transforming Commerce as we Know It , 1999 .

[9]  Hannes Werthner,et al.  Harmonise: A Step Toward an Interoperable E-Tourism Marketplace , 2005, Int. J. Electron. Commer..

[10]  John W. Payne,et al.  Task complexity and contingent processing in decision making: An information search and protocol analysis☆ , 1976 .

[11]  Dan Ariely,et al.  Goal-Based Construction of Preferences: Task Goals and the Prominence Effect , 1999 .

[12]  H. Simon,et al.  Theories of Decision-Making in Economics and Behavioural Science , 1966 .

[13]  Mary Frances Luce,et al.  Attribute Conflict and Preference Uncertainty: The RandMAU Model , 2000 .

[14]  Andrea Omicini,et al.  Proceedings of the 2005 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, March 13-17, 2005 , 2005, SAC.

[15]  M. Keane,et al.  Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: Capturing Dynamic Brand Choice Processes in Turbulent Consumer Goods Markets , 1996 .

[16]  A. Charnes,et al.  Some Models for Estimating Technical and Scale Inefficiencies in Data Envelopment Analysis , 1984 .

[17]  David L. Olson,et al.  Rationality in Information Systems Support to Decision Making , 2001, Inf. Syst. Frontiers.

[18]  Vijay V. Raghavan,et al.  A critical investigation of recall and precision as measures of retrieval system performance , 1989, TOIS.

[19]  Mo Adam Mahmood,et al.  On-line Shopping Behavior: Cross-Country Empirical Research , 2004, Int. J. Electron. Commer..

[20]  Varun Grover,et al.  The Role of System Trust in Business-to-Consumer Transactions , 2003, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[21]  Kar Yan Tam,et al.  The Effects of Information Format and Shopping Task on Consumers' Online Shopping Behavior: A Cognitive Fit Perspective , 2004, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[22]  Antonis C. Stylianou,et al.  Pricing on the Internet and in Conventional Retail Channels: A Study of Over-the-Counter Pharmaceutical Products , 2005, Int. J. Electron. Commer..

[23]  Pai-Cheng Chu,et al.  The Joint Effects of Effort and Quality on Decision Strategy Choice with Computerized Decision Aids , 2000, Decis. Sci..

[24]  G CegielskiCasey,et al.  Emerging information technologies , 2005 .

[25]  Valerie J. Trifts,et al.  Consumer Decision Making in Online Shopping Environments: The Effects of Interactive Decision Aids , 2000 .

[26]  Paolo Avesani,et al.  A trust-enhanced recommender system application: Moleskiing , 2005, SAC '05.

[27]  Marios Koufaris,et al.  The Effect of Web Site Perceptions on Initial Trust in the Owner Company , 2005, Int. J. Electron. Commer..

[28]  Melody Y. Kiang,et al.  Understand user preference of online shoppers , 2004, IEEE International Conference on e-Technology, e-Commerce and e-Service, 2004. EEE '04. 2004.

[29]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Agents that buy and sell , 1999, CACM.

[30]  M. F. Luce,et al.  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes When Time Is Money: Decision Behavior under Opportunity-cost Time Pressure , 2022 .

[31]  S. Viswanathan,et al.  Recommendation Systems: Decision Support for the Information Economy , 1998 .

[32]  Irwin P. Levin,et al.  Phased Narrowing: A New Process Tracing Method for Decision Making , 1995 .

[33]  Sean B. Eom,et al.  Designing effective cyber store user interface , 2002, Ind. Manag. Data Syst..

[34]  Anne P. Massey,et al.  Cultural differences in the online behavior of consumers , 2002, CACM.

[35]  Cheri Speier,et al.  The Influence of Query Interface Design on Decision-Making Performance , 2003, MIS Q..

[36]  William W. CooperKyung.  IDEA and AR-IDEA: Models for Dealing with Imprecise Data in DEA , 1999 .

[37]  Izak Benbasat,et al.  Inducing compensatory information processing through decision aids that facilitate effort reduction: an experimental assessment , 2000 .

[38]  Greg M. Allenby,et al.  A Choice Model with Conjunctive, Disjunctive, and Compensatory Screening Rules , 2004 .

[39]  John W. Payne,et al.  The adaptive decision maker: Name index , 1993 .

[40]  Ajit Kambil,et al.  Consumer Behavior in Web-Based Commerce: An Empirical Study , 2001, Int. J. Electron. Commer..

[41]  Izak Benbasat,et al.  The Use of Information in Decision Making: An Experimental Investigation of the Impact of Computer-Based Decision Aids , 1992, MIS Q..

[42]  Francesco Ricci,et al.  Feature selection methods for conversational recommender systems , 2005, 2005 IEEE International Conference on e-Technology, e-Commerce and e-Service.

[43]  G. Katona.  What is consumer psychology? , 1967, The American psychologist.

[44]  Detmar W. Straub,et al.  Trust and TAM in Online Shopping: An Integrated Model , 2003, MIS Q..

[45]  Eric J. Johnson,et al.  The adaptive decision maker , 1993 .

[46]  R. Bucklin,et al.  Modeling Purchase Behavior at an E-Commerce Web Site: A Task-Completion Approach , 2004 .

[47]  Paul W. P. J. Grefen,et al.  A Three-Level Framework for Process and Data Management of Complex E-Services , 2003, Int. J. Cooperative Inf. Syst..

[48]  Soe-Tsyr Yuan,et al.  A personalized and integrative comparison-shopping engine and its applications , 2003, Decis. Support Syst..

[49]  Charles J. Kacmar,et al.  Trust in e-commerce vendors: a two-stage model , 2000, ICIS.

[50]  Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa,et al.  The effect of task demands and graphical format on information processing strategies , 1989 .

[51]  Huei Huang Kuan,et al.  Comparing the Effects of Usability on Customer Conversion and Retention at E-Commerce Websites , 2005, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[52]  Sumit Sarkar,et al.  The Role of the Management Sciences in Research on Personalization , 2003, Manag. Sci..

[53]  Izak Benbasat,et al.  The effects of decision support and task contingencies on model formulation: A cognitive perspective , 1996, Decis. Support Syst..

[54]  N. Klein,et al.  Context Effects on Effort and Accuracy in Choice: An Enquiry into Adaptive Decision Making , 1989 .