Prior research has shown that online recommendations have a significant influence on consumers’ preference ratings and economic behavior. Specifically, biases induced by observing personalized system recommendations can lead to distortions in users’ self-reported preference ratings after consumption of an item, thus contaminating the users’ subsequent inputs to the recommender system. This, in turn, provides the system with an inaccurate view of user preferences and opens up possibilities of rating manipulation. As recommender systems continue to become increasingly popular in today’s online environments, preventing or reducing such system-induced biases constitutes a highly important and practical research problem. In this paper, we address this problem via the analysis of different rating display designs for the purpose of proactively preventing biases before they occur (i.e., at rating collection time). We use randomized laboratory experimentation to test how the presentation format of personalized recommendations affects the biases generated in post-consumption preference ratings. We demonstrate that graphical rating display designs of recommender systems are more advantageous than numerical designs in reducing the biases, although none are able to remove biases completely. We also show that scale compatibility is a contributing mechanism operating to create these biases, although not the only one. Together, the results have practical implications for the design and implementation of recommender systems as well as theoretical implications for the study of recommendation biases.

As artificial intelligence (AI) tools have become pervasive in business applications, so too have interactions between AI and humans in business processes and decision-making. A growing area of research has focused on human decision and task delegation to AI assistants. Simultaneously, extensive research on algorithm aversion—humans’ resistance to algorithm-based decision tools—has demonstrated potential barriers and issues with AI applications in business. In this paper, we test a simple strategy for mitigating algorithm aversion in the context of AI task delegation. We show that simply changing the framing of decision tasks can allay algorithm aversion. Through multiple studies, we found that participants exhibited a strong preference for human assistance over AI assistance when they were rewarded for task performance (i.e., money was gained for good performance), even when the AI had been shown to outperform the human assistant on the task. Alternatively, when we reframed the task such that the participant experienced losses for poor performance (i.e., money was taken from their endowment for poor performance), the bias for preferring human assistance was removed. Under loss framing, participants delegated the decision task to human and AI assistants at similar rates. We demonstrate this finding across tasks at differing levels of complexity and at different incentive sizes. We also provide evidence that loss framing increases situational awareness, which drives the observed effects. Our results offer useful insights on reducing algorithm aversion that extend the literature and provide actionable suggestions for practitioners and managers. This paper was accepted by Dongjun Wu, Special Issue on the Human-Algorithm Connection. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.05585 .