Can Trailers Help to Alleviate Popularity Bias in Choice-Based Preference Elicitation?

Previous research showed that choice-based preference elicitation can be successfully used to reduce effort during user cold start, resulting in an improved user satisfaction with the recommender system. However, it has also been shown to result in highly popular recommendations. In the present study we investigate if trailers reduce this bias to popular recommendations by informing the user and enticing her to choose less popular movies. In a user study we show that users that watched trailers chose relatively less popular movies and how trailers affected the overall user experience with the recommender system.