The Embeddedness of Social Links In The Era Of Online Intelligent Agents
Consumers can nowadays relay on the support of specific recommendation agents designed to reduce search costs and increase the chance to find products and services that match their needs and preferences. Typical instances of how recommender agents are placed on e-commerce platforms are represented by statements like "you may also like..." or " People who like this also like" that online buyers typically encounter after having completed a purchase. Although these agents are widely adopted in online shopping contexts it remains a topic that is largely not researched in the marketing perspective. Their implicit social structure enabled by the algorithms, the role of individuals within the implicit networks and their role have not been investigated yet. We propose a Network Analysis on Amazon's public dataset (>10Gb) with the aim to investigate implicit network of consumption created by algorithms and their structure.