Understanding Post-Adoption Regret from the Perspectives of Herding and Mindfulness

In the era of multiple technologies, people may herd in technology adoption to save costs. However, they may regret for not choosing a foregone technology later although they are satisfied with the chosen technology. The extant continuance studies have extensively studied how users evaluate the focal technology after adoption, but somewhat overlooking users’ considerations on foregone technologies. In this study, we introduce the notion of post-adoption regret, which considers both the chosen and foregone technologies. We develop a research model based on the literature on regret, herd behavior, and mindfulness. The model depicts how herd behavior induces regret and how regret affects user satisfaction, as well as the subsequent continuance and switching intention. As a remedy for such regret resulting from herding, mindfulness of technology adoption is proposed as a legitimate strategy for technology adoption in parallel with herd in technology adoption. We tested our model through a longitudinal study

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

Examining the role of mindfulness in mitigating technostress and its negative consequences

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe proliferation and ubiquity of information technologies (ICTs) have transformed the working environment of organizations, making imperative the engagement of individuals with various technologies for the accomplishment of their work tasks. Although ICTs have offered significant benefits both to individuals and organizations, those advances have come with some costs. Recently, academic literature has shown an increased interest in the dark side or else the negative aspects of technology usage within the workplace, focusing on the stress that individuals experience due to the extended usage of ICTs called technostress. A considerable amount of literature has been published on the concept of technostress revealing its severe consequences on individuals, leading to huge monetary costs for organizations; however, few studies have investigated mechanisms for the alleviation of this phenomenon thus the need for further research is crucial. Addressing this call of research, the present study contributes to the technostress literature by adopting for the first time a mindfulness perspective. The current study aims to examine the role of mindfulness as an organizational mechanism that can mitigate the impact of technostress on individuals as well as alleviate its negative consequences. By following a mixed methods approach, the current study involved two phases; At first, a theoretical framework was developed, based on the transactional-based model of stress, in order to examine the influence of mindfulness on technostress as well as its impact on job related and IT usage related outcomes. By conducting a survey-based approach and exploring a sample of 500 working individuals, the developed model was validated through SEM analysis revealing that mindfulness constitutes a powerful mechanism that can effectively reduce technostress, increase job satisfaction while also enhance user satisfaction while utilizing ICTs for work tasks and improve task performance. During the second phase of the study, the thematic analysis of the collected data, derived from semi-structured interviews, validated the results of the quantitative analysis confirming the role of mindfulness in reducing technostress conditions; while also yielded deeper insights revealing a set of strategies that more mindful individuals deploy during technostress experiences. Overall, the current study enhances existing literature in the IS domain by revealing the valuable role of mindfulness in protecting individuals against the negative impact of stressful events occurring due to ICT usage while also providing substantial practical implications; By introducing mindfulness programs for their employees, corporate and HR managers can significantly improve employees’ work life, increase individual productivity and enhance overall wellbeing at work thus ultimately improving the business performance and overall success of the organization