my2cents: enabling research on consumer-product interaction

Barcode scanners for smartphones enable mobile product-centric services for consumers. We have developed a mobile app that enables consumers to share their use of and opinions about products with their friends and others. Our goal is to establish a product-centric information stream generated by users to benefit other consumers and retail businesses and to enable large-scale research on consumer-product interaction. This paper describes our approach to create a sustainable service. We report first experiences and an initial evaluation after releasing the app to the public, give an overview over possible business models, and discuss some of the challenges we experienced during implementatio

DIGITAL COMMUTING: THE EFFECT OF SOCIAL NORMATIVE FEEDBACK ON E-BIKE COMMUTING - EVIDENCE FROM A FIELD STUDY

As a consequnce of extensive urban growth, local transportation systems are facing enormous challenges, leading to massive investments in infrastructure and travel demand management measures to steer demand for specific travel modes. Meanwhile, technological advancements are creating unprecedented opportunities for collecting and utilizing travel data at previously unknown levels of detail. Such information may in the form of social normative feedback constitute a powerful tool for influncing human behaviour. Focusing on electric bicycles (e-bikes) as potentially central means of future transportation, this study evaluates whether IS-enabled social normative feedback can increase the usage of e-bikes for commuting. The results of a five-week field study and mixed effects logistic regression analysis support a positive impact of social normative feedback on e-bike commuting. We, however, also detect a negative effect on a group of participants with particularly long commuting distances, and effects of weather conditions and commuting distances on e-bike usage. Our findings add to existing research in the areas of travel mode choice, and social norms, and support policy makers in travel demand management. Ultimately, employers may view our findings as a source of inspiration for promoting the health of their employees and increasing the attractiveness of their places to work

PERSUASIVE MESSAGES: THE EFFECT OF PROFILING

In the present study, we investigate to which degree persuasion profiling can increase the effectiveness of adaptive persuasive systems. For this purpose, an experiment was conducted in which subjects were exposed to persuasive SMS messages under three experimental conditions. One group received messages that fit to their personality traits, a second group obtained messages that do not fit, and a third group was exposed to a random selection of messages. Comparing the degree to which the three experimental groups responded to the messages, we could show that well-fitting messages and randomly selected messages perform significantly better than non-fitting messages, whereas the difference between well-fitting and randomly selected messages was not significant

The Impact of Goal-Congruent Feature Additions on Core IS Feature Use: When More Is Less and Less Is More

This research investigates the impact of feature additions on the use of an information system’s (IS) existing core features. Based on prior work in marketing and IS, we hypothesize conflicting effects on the usage of the system as a whole and the IS core due to the goal congruence of the two feature sets. In three consecutive empirical studies, we consider the example of a utilitarian consumer IS in the form of a mobile insurance app with additional weather-related functionality. The statistical results indicate that the goal-congruent feature addition exerts a positive influence on system use, whereas the impact on core IS use is negative. More specifically, we show that the latter effect can be explained by changes in the users’ perceptions of the usefulness and ease of use of the core features. From a theoretical perspective, our work goes beyond the predominant system view of technology acceptance and use by employing a more fine-grained, feature-oriented level of investigation, which opens several avenues for further research regarding the relationships between information systems and the features they comprise. From a managerial perspective, the results help to characterize the detrimental effects that feature additions may have on IS usage. These consequences become particularly relevant when revenue, cost savings, or other benefits on the part of IS operators are linked only to a subset of the entire IS functionality, as in the case of certain web portals or mobile apps

A quantitative evaluation of NFC based contactless payment systems in retail

Near Field Communication (NFC) technology allows for the implementation of novel contactless payment systems in stationary retail. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the impact of such systems on a retailer\u27s payment costs on the example of real-world data from a Swiss food retailer. Our results indicate that the introduction of contactless payment under current card fee models would in virtually any case significantly increase the payment costs due to the substitution of low cost cash payments for expensive card payments. This increase might be balanced out by a substantial growth in sales, a reduction in operating costs, or a reduction of card transaction fees

Reducing Environmental Impact in Procurement by Integrating Material Parameters in Information Systems: The Example of Apple Sourcing

Legislation, customer pressure, and energy costs are increasing the interest of enterprises in environmental performance indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions and energy usage. Currently, business users take decisions across the value chain, from product design to disposal, without the ability to compare the environmental impact of alternatives within their information systems, thus limiting the optimization potential. In this paper we consider procurement as an example business operation and show how capturing previously-unknown material parameters in the respective information system can significantly increase the achievable optimizations. We use apple procurement into the U.K. to illustrate the paper’s idea, and conduct Monte Carlo analysis to quantify the realizable impact reductions as each additional life cycle parameter is tracked. The results show that taking into account the production country alone achieves a decrease in energy consumption of around 1250MJ per ton of apples, equivalent to 28% reduction from the base case