Preference diversity and openness to novelty: Scales construction from the perspective of movie recommendation

In response to calls for recommender systems to balance accuracy and alternative measures such as diversity and novelty, we propose that recommendation strategies should be applied adaptively according to users' preference traits. Psychological scales for “preference diversity” and “openness to novelty” were developed to measure users' willingness to accept diverse and novel recommendations, respectively. To validate the scales empirically, a user study was conducted in which 293 regular moviegoers were asked to judge a set of 220 movies representing both mainstream and "long‐tail" appeals. The judgment task involved indicating and rating movies they had seen, heard of but not seen, and not known previously. Correlatoin analyses were then conducted between the participants' preference diversity and openness to novelty scores with the diversity and novelty of their past movie viewing profile and movies they had not seen before but shown interest in. Preference diversity scores were shown to be significantly related to the diversity of the movies they had seen. Higher preference diversity scores were also associated with greater diversity in favored unknown movies. Similarly, participants who scored high on the openness to novelty scale had viewed more little‐known movies and were generally interested in less popular movies as well as movies that differed from those they had seen before. Implications of these psychological traits for recommendation strategies are also discussed.