Navigating the Paradox of Choice in the Digital Age: A Scoping Review on the Potential Role of Recommender Systems

In today’s digitally driven landscape, people face an ever-expanding array of choices, potentially leading to choice overload or “The choice paradox.” This phenomenon arises when the abundance of options overwhelms decision-making processes, causing dissatisfaction and increased difficulty in reaching a decision. To address this challenge, recommender systems, or recommendation agents, have emerged as tools designed to assist users in navigating the complex world of choices. Understanding the effectiveness of these systems in alleviating choice overload is crucial given their widespread use across various domains. This review aims to explore the extent to which recommender systems effectively mitigate choice overload and the factors contributing to their efficacy by consolidating available evidence. A systematic search on Scopus and Google Scholar was conducted, analyzing relevant texts that met specific eligibility criteria to comprehensively explore the topic. Eleven studies were selected from the pool to create a comprehensive overview of the existing literature. The findings underscore the complexities of assessing the impact of recommendation systems on choice difficulty. This complexity arises from the recognition that various variables, extending beyond system design to include user personal traits and decision contexts, can influence the effectiveness of recommendation agents. This scoping review emphasizes the need for further studies to truly understand the influence of recommender systems on users’ decision-making processes. As a result, this review aims to provide a pivotal overview of current domain knowledge, paving the way for future research and insights to enhance decision-making in the face of the challenge of choice overload.