How Happy Are You With Your Online Product Decisions?

Dr. Lerzan Aksoy and non-Fordham colleagues have studied how consumers can evaluate the relevance of online product recommendation "agents" for their own needs and wants.

Electronic product recommendation agents, such as those offered by Amazon.com and MyProductadvisor.com, are basically “online salespeople” that help consumers sort through large amounts of product information, rank order products based on whether they match the consumers’ preferences and ultimately help them make decisions. But what is the best way to measure whether the decisions they make using these agents are the best possible ones for themselves? Research conducted by Aksoy and colleagues demonstrates that, for different types of online agents, using certain single measures do a good job of capturing consumers’ decision quality and how happy they are with those decisions.

This research helps managers determine the best and easiest way to measure their customers’ happiness levels with their choices. After all happy customers are those that come back again and again…

Source: Aksoy, Lerzan, Bruce Cooil and Nicholas Lurie (forthcoming 2011), “Decision Quality Measures in Recommendation Agents Research," Journal of Interactive Marketing.