Exploring recommender systems for decision making in e-tourism

Many factors that in uence users' decision making processes in Recommender Systems (RSs) have been investigated by a relatively vast research of empirical and theoretical nature, mostly in the eld of e-commerce. In this thesis, we discuss some aspects of the user experience with RSs that may a ect the decision making process and outcome, and have been marginally addressed by prior research. These include the nature of users' goals and the dynamic characteristics of the resources space (e.g., availability during the search process). We argue that these subjective and objective factors of the user experience with a RS call for a rethinking of the decision making process as it is normally assumed in traditional RSs, and raise a number or research challenges. These concepts are exempli ed in the application domain of on-line services and speci cally hotel booking, a eld where we are carrying on a number of activities in cooperation with a large stakeholder (Venere.com - a company of Expedia Inc.). Still, most of the arguments discussed in this work can be extended to other domains, and have general implications for RS design and evaluation.