Customization Bias in Decision Support Systems

Many Decision Support Systems (DSS) afford customization of inputs or algorithms before generating recommendations to a decision maker. This paper describes an experiment in which users make decisions assisted by recommendations of a DSS in a fantasy baseball game. This experiment shows that the act of customizing a DSS can lead to biased decision making. I show that users who believe they have customized a DSS's recommendation algorithm are more likely to follow the recommendations regardless of their accuracy. I also show that this customization bias is the result of using a DSS to seek confirmatory information in a recommendation.