Social Cues as Digital Nudges in Information Systems Usage Contexts

Analysing human cognition and decision-making has become highly relevant in information systems (IS) research. Yet, although the notion of cognitive biases has been studied for more than 40 years in psychology and other related fields, IS researchers have only recently expressed explicit interest in this phenomenon. Even more nascent is the IS stream that emphasizes the usage and understanding of biases in the favor of humanistic outcomes (e.g., the well-being of individuals) beyond previous scientific endeavors to pursue instrumental goals (e.g., the profit of companies). This fact is reflected in the recent emergence and call for digital nudges - influences that rely on heuristics and biases to guide individuals to beneficial decisions through modest adjustments of the digital choice environments. To advance the emergent research in this field, this thesis targets one of the major bias categories: the social bias (i.e., systematic errors that result from an individual’s interpretation of social cues). Within four articles, the thesis addresses the role of social cues as digital nudges in various IS usage contexts. The first two articles investigate how directly-traceable social cues can overcome service adoption hurdles: Precisely, the first article investigates how employing a verbal (i.e., platform self-disclosure) and a nonverbal social cue (i.e., message interactivity) in a conversational agent (i.e., chatbot) influence users to voluntary self-disclose private information (i.e., e-mail addresses). Moreover, the results revealed that the analysed social cues do not have individual effects, but in fact boost each other through their interaction. The second article deals with the application of various directly-traceable social cues (e.g., pictures of human avatars) as well as the role of personalized recommendations in financial advisory services to improve investors’ financial well-being. The results demonstrate that not only directly-traceable social cues but also recommendations can increase a user’s perceived social presence during the interaction, which in turn influences potential investors to invest higher amounts. The third article continues with recommendations as social cues, yet analyses them from an indirectly-traceable perspective and is devoted to investigating whether the source of the recommendation (i.e., seller or other customers) influences the acceptance of the recommendation in augmented reality applications to help customers in finding the best product for their needs. The findings indicate that customer recommendations reduce a customer’s perceived fit uncertainty of a product, resulting in a higher intention to purchase of a product that previous customers recommended. However, customers refrain from adhering to an automatically-generated recommendation despite recent technological advances that may provide more personalized and thus more suitable recommendations than generic customer recommendations. The fourth and last article examines the impact of displaying sold-out products on campaign success in reward-based crowdfunding. The valuable information indicate how potential backers make use of displayed sold-out product as social cues to derive information for their decision-making from previous backing behavior. In addition, the findings also showed that sold-out products do not have an impact on their own, however, their effect is also influenced by other factors in the environment, namely discount amount and the number of backers (i.e., another social cue). Thus, the article provides learnings for project creators on the design of reward option menus. Overall, this thesis showcases the variety and importance of social cues in numerous applications and is, therefore, to be understood as a first approach to expanding the understudied research field. Furthermore, the results enrich previous research and elucidate various underlying explanatory mechanisms of how and why biased decision-making takes place and how these mechanisms may be used to nudge users in directions beneficial for them and for the employer of these nudges. The overarching contributions of this thesis for research consists of (1) investigating the existence and effects of various social cues on user decision-making, and (2) probing social cues in several IS usage contexts with their unique circumstances and influences, not only in a vacuum but also in conjunction with other interacting variables. Additionally, this thesis provides interesting and sometimes even counterintuitive recommendations as well as actionable and generalizable guidelines on social cues that practitioners can easily apply to various contexts

Essays In Online Platform Operations

This dissertation studies problems of managing the operations in online platforms, especially when the behavior of agents on the platform is leveraged by users/platform managers to make better decisions. We study three distinct online platforms with unique challenges: in online crowdfunding platforms, how should a creator of campaigns take advantage of the heterogeneity in backers (independent backers vs. herding backers) to maximize the expected revenue; in online spot labor platforms, how employers decide whom to hire, and how experiential learning could help the platform create better matches; in online social media platforms, how people are affected by misinformation. We use both mathematical modeling and data-analytic tools to tackle these problems: we propose optimal pledge levels and campaign durations for campaign creators; we uncover the role of experiential learning in hiring decisions, and design platform\u27s policies to exploit the informational advantage of employers; we find that consumers tend to co-consume mainstream information and unverified information, but substitution is not necessarily required for consumers to get hurt from unverified information. We hope this dissertation sheds lights on the management of different types of online platforms

Home-bias in online fundraising: an analysis of international reward-based crowdfunding

Home Bias is the recognized tendency of individuals to choose geographically proximate interaction partners. In business finance, Home Bias is to the detriment of both investors and entrepreneurs because it promotes an uneven distribution of capital and contributes to the Global Finance Gap. The aim of this thesis is to examine the existence of Home Bias in the emerging financing channel of reward-based crowdfunding. Crowdfunding, in general, is different from traditional financing because it shifts the entire fundraising process to a digital space on the internet. Moreover, it introduces new community-based trust mechanisms and eliminates some of the distance-related costs. The focus of this thesis lies on reward-based crowdfunding, which is currently the most popular, unrestricted and, therefore, most international form of crowdfunding. To assess whether international reward-based crowdfunding is prone to Home Bias, this thesis employs a Negative Binomial regression model that examines the relationship between the count of crowdfunding project backers and their respective distance to entrepreneurs. The model builds on an aggregate data sample of 1,118,654 project-specific country-to-country investment observations (from 211,695 projects) that occurred on Kickstarter platform between 2009 and 2020, making it the largest and most up to date crowdfunding study. Although large sample or “Big Data” models provide many advantages (e.g., higher representativeness), and have been commonly used in the crowdfunding literature, they however introduce some caveats that have been mostly ignored by previous research. One main issue that might distort results in Big Data models is that they are capable to identify marginally small patterns in the data that, although statistically significant in terms of p-values, might have little relevance in practice. Therefore, this thesis goes beyond the traditional analysis of statistical significance and devotes great attention to the assessment of different marginal effect sizes to identify the practical relevance of findings. The thesis also investigates the effect of additional variables that may have potential effect on the count of backers namely GDP per capita of backers and entrepreneurs, project category, third-party endorsements, herding behaviour and Covid-19 pandemic. The results suggest that although geographical distance appears to have a statistically significant negative influence on the count of backers, its practical effect is very small. This indicates that Home Bias has a comparably small relevance in international reward-based crowdfunding and that entrepreneurs should not overestimate its impact when planning their crowdfunding campaigns. Moreover, neither individual wealth of backers nor entrepreneurs, project category or global economic crises seem to affect the success of crowdfunding campaigns in a practically relevant manner. However, herding behaviour and third-party endorsements do seem to have a statistically and practically relevant influence on the count of backers and, therefore, should be considered in the planning of crowdfunding campaigns. The overall findings of this thesis suggest that some of the prior research in crowdfunding might have overestimated the practical relevance of certain influencing factors (e.g., geographical distance and individual wealth), perhaps by focusing too much on statistical significance while ignoring the capability of Big Data models to identify marginally small and practically irrelevant patterns in the data

Making History: Applications of Digitization and Materialization Projects in Repositories

This project draws upon material culture, digital humanities, and archival theory and method in the service of public history investigations. After selecting an artifact and performing object analysis, I will digitize the artifact and materialize a new object. I will then perform another object analysis on the 3D printed object. This exercise will provide the familiar benefits of object analysis, but the decisions and interactions necessary to digitize and materialize the object provide a fresh perspective. I will propose approaches for performing similar investigations in repositories, along with a pedagogical argument for doing so. By emphasizing modularity, flexibility, and minimal capital requirements, I hope these approaches can be adapted to a variety of institutions and audiences. Researchers will reap the benefits of intellectual and emotional engagement, hands-on learning, and technological experimentation. Public historians will have the opportunity to engage in outreach and innovative education and exploration of their collections

Social Impact Investing: Financing Social Change. Bertelsmann Studies

Germany is facing costly challenges. Social, demographic and ecological developments require us to not only support proven solutions within our social sector, but also to test new ideas and approaches. If these prove to be successful and effective, the next step must be to ensure that they are implemented in a manner befitting the existing system. This is impossible without the strong commitment of the professionals and volunteers working within our social sector. In order to ensure they have the necessary resources available to them, I believe the financing options in this sector must be expanded

Startup dilemmas - Strategic problems of early-stage platforms on the internet

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