The Role of Cognitive Absorption in Recommender System Reuse

Abstract

E-commerce is the trade of services and goods via electronic means such as the Internet. It is critical in today’s business and user experience. Most current e-commerce websites employ various technologies such as recommender systems to provide customers with personalised recommendations. Taking this as a cue, this study investigates the effect of cognitive absorption to estimate the holistic experience of recommender systems on shoppers’ intentions to reuse recommender systems. Data collected from 366 online shoppers were analysed using structural equation modelling to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings highlight that cognitive absorption directly and indirectly affects shoppers’ behavioural intentions to reuse recommender systems. The results also exposed the moderating effect of gender on shoppers’ behavioural intentions to reuse recommender systems. An importance-performance map analysis was also conducted to identify significant areas of improvement for e-vendors. This study contributes to advancing existing knowledge relevant to shoppers’ behavioural intentions to reuse recommender systems. The study also provides e-vendor managers with insights into online shoppers’ decision making.