Effective Strategies for Contents Recommendation Based on Psychological Ownership of over the Top Services in Cyberspace

Abstract

With the advanced development of IT, people are spending an increasing amount of time in the cyberspace and perceive psychological ownership of intangible objects (e.g., e-books, avatars, online movie streaming services), which they come to regard as “theirs”. This study focuses on users’ psychological ownership of OTT (over the top) services, which have recently received much attention, and investigates how service providers can present recommendation information more effectively when recommending content to users. This study, based on psychological ownership theory, specifically attempts to verify which method of recommending information is effective in correlation to the level of psychological ownership that a user feels about an online service. Additionally, this study presents this effect in terms of psychological distance, which we argue is the underlying mechanism of psychological ownership. Watcha, one of South Korea’s OTT services, was employed as the experimental subject in this study, and a scenario-based test was conducted. In conclusion, this study found that for users with high psychological ownership of online services, a recommendation information message based on objective and concrete information about a movie was more effective, whereas for users with low psychological ownership, abstractly expressed messages were more effective. Furthermore, by applying a moderated mediation model, this study confirmed that psychological distance mediated the results stated above.