Events

Dr. Guangrui (Kayla) Li
Assistant Professor of Operations Management and Information System
The Schulich School of Business
York University

Algorithmic recommendation has been widely used in various domains such as social media, E-commerce, and video or music sharing platforms. Algorithms predict the tastes of users, recommend contents or products accordingly, and influence users’ decisions in an unnoticeable way. This allows algorithms to exert a long-lasting effect on us and change our preferences. One of the most important preferences that could be changed by algorithms is patience (time preference) – the marginal rate of substitution between current and future consumption. On the one hand, traditional video consumption process involves an active searching phrase, algorithmic recommendation significantly shortens the length of this phrase by feeding users with relevant contents instantly and constantly, thus may decrease users’ patience; on the other hand, such constant feeding can increase users’ happiness and positive moods, and lead to increases in users’ patience. In this study, we combined lab and field experiments to investigate this research question, interestingly, we found that male users became more patient after turning off algorithmic recommendation on Tiktok, while no significant change was detected for female users.