Asymmetric Dominance- and Compromise Effects in the Financial Services Domain

Recommender systems help customers to identify products which fulfill certain requirements. Many different approaches have been developed and work well for different domains. What has been ignored so far is the fact that psychological phenomena can result in sub optimal decision taking on recommender result pages. This paper presents a user study investigating the Asymmetric Dominance Effect and the Compromise Effect in the domain of financial services. The empirical findings are compared with the calculations of the Simple Dominance Model which serves as a model for identification and explanation of such effects. Furthermore, we show how to identify misleading effects on recommender result pages, and how to correct product perception such that the felt utility reflects the utility calculated by recommender systems.