The influence of knowledgeable explanations on users' perception of a recommender system

Recommender Systems (RS) help online customers in identifying those items from a variety of choices that best match their presumed needs and preferences. In this context explanations summarize the reasons why a specific item is proposed and are capable of increasing the users' trust in the system's results. This paper presents results from an online experiment on a real-world platform indicating that explanations are an essential piece of functionality of a recommendation system, that significantly increases users' perception of the utility of a recommender system, the intention to use it repeatedly as well as the commitment to recommend it to others.