Serendipity in the city: User evaluations of urban recommender systems

Abstract

The contemporary city is increasingly being labeled as a smart city consisting of both physical and virtual spaces. This digital augmentation of urban life sets the scene for urban recommender systems to help citizens dealing with the abundance of digital information and corresponding choice overload, for example, by recommending the best place to have dinner based on your personal profile. There are, however, concerns that this kind of algorithmic filtering could lead to homogenization of urban experiences and a decline of social cohesion among citizens. To overcome this issue, scholars increasingly encourage the introduction of serendipity in all types of recommender systems. Nonetheless, it remains unclear how this can be achieved in practice. In this work, we study user evaluations of serendipity in urban recommender systems through a survey among 1641 citizens. More specifically, we study which characteristics of recommended items contribute to serendipitous experiences and to what extent this increases user satisfaction and conversion. Our results align with findings in other application domains in the sense that there is a strong relation between the relevance and novelty of recommendations and the corresponding experienced serendipity. Moreover, serendipitous recommendations are found to increase the chance of users following up on these recommendations.

Designing for serendipity: a means or an end?

“…This plea builds upon Sunstein's (2017) argument of “chance encounters and shared experiences” being crucial for a well-functioning democracy. A similar line of thought is expressed by urbanists who consider serendipity in urban environments as a crucial element of cities’ social fabric and economic growth (Jacobs, 1961; Sennett and Sendra, 2020; Smets et al. , 2021).…”

“…This plea builds upon Sunstein's (2017) argument of "chance encounters and shared experiences" being crucial for a well-functioning democracy. A similar line of thought is expressed by urbanists who consider serendipity in urban environments as a crucial element of cities' social fabric and economic growth (Jacobs, 1961;Sennett and Sendra, 2020;Smets et al, 2021). Others then argue for encouraging serendipity in responsible research and innovation as a means to enhance the societal impacts of research (Holbrook, 2019;Sauer and Bonelli, 2020).…”

“…Although different weights have been given to each of the two factors, it has been emphasized that serendipity is not the result of merely one of them but rather their combination (Copeland, 2019;Melo and Carvalhais, 2016). This view has found its way into studies investigating the role of both external and internal factors in experiences of serendipity (Lutz et al, 2017;McCay-Peet and Toms, 2015;Smets et al, 2021). There is, however, a growing awareness of the importance of a third factor: value, and valuable outcomes in particular (Cunha et al, 2010;Makri et al, 2017;Makri and Blandford, 2012b;Napier and Vuong, 2013).…”

“…This view has found its way into studies investigating the role of both external and internal factors in experiences of serendipity (Lutz et al. , 2017; McCay-Peet and Toms, 2015; Smets et al. , 2021).…”

Anomaly Detection on Natural Language Processing to Improve Predictions on Tourist Preferences

“…In [26], the authors provided a fascinating study of users' evaluations of serendipity in urban recommender systems through a survey among 1641 citizens. They studied which characteristics of recommended items contribute to serendipitous experiences and to what extent this increases user satisfaction and conversion.…”