A study on consumers' trust formation model toward recommendation agents: Elaboration likelihood model

It is important to make them have trust in Recommendation Agents (RAs), further enhance their intentions to adopt RAs. This study is based on Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) to examine how consumers' (1) (central routes) degree of cognitive effort are affected by providing product-related information, (2) (peripheral routes) degree of social presence are affected by anthropomorphic interface, and (3) product knowledge influence their trust in RAs. We used PLS to analysis the 302 valid samples, and test or verify the hypotheses. The conclusions are as follows: (1) Explanation facility and information search about products significantly increase customers' trust in RAs. (2) Consumers' degree of cognitive effort and telepresence would increase their decision satisfaction and social presence respectively, further their cognitive trust and emotional trust. (3) The experts and novices have different ways to establish their trust in RAs.