Proceedings of the ACM Recommender Systems 2012 Workshop on Human Decision Making in Recommender Systems (Decisions@RecSys 2012)

Interacting with a recommender system means to take different decisions such as selecting a song/movie from a recommendation list, selecting specific feature values (e.g., camera’s size, zoom) as criteria, selecting feedback features to be critiqued in a critiquing based recommendation session, or selecting a repair proposal for inconsistent user preferences when interacting with a knowledge-based recommender. In all these scenarios, users have to solve a decision task. The complexity of decision tasks, limited cognitive resources of users, and the tendency to keep the overall decision effort as low as possible lead to the phenomenon of bounded rationality, i.e., users exploit decision heuristics rather than trying to take an optimal decision. Furthermore, preferences of users will likely change throughout a recommendation session, i.e., preferences are constructed in a specific decision environment and users do not know their preferences beforehand. Decision making under bounded rationality is a door opener for different types of non-conscious influences on the decision behavior of a user. Theories from decision psychology and cognitive psychology are trying to explain these influences, for example, decoy effects and defaults can trigger significant shifts in item selection probabilities; in group decision scenarios, the visibility of the preferences of other group members can have a significant impact on the final group decision. The major goal of this workshop was to establish a platform for industry and academia to present and discuss new ideas and research results that are related to the topic of human decision making in recommender systems. The workshop consisted of technical sessions in which results of ongoing research as reported in these proceedings were presented, a keynote talk given by Joseph A. Konstan on “Decision-Making and Recommender Systems: Failures, Successes, and Research Directions” and a wrap up session chaired by Alexander Felfernig.