How Does Extended Reality Influence Consumer Decision Making? The Empirical Evidence from A Laboratory Experiment

Extended reality (XR) technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have been postulated to revolutionize many human endeavors commonly undertaken at a location such as work, education, shopping and so on. While this future scenario may become reality sooner or later in the future, it is an increasingly pertinent question how these technologies may affect our cognitive processing and related decision making. Especially in business and marketing, consumers’ decision making and choice plays the determining role in the business success. Therefore in this study we conduct a laboratory experiment in the shopping context for investigating the two main aspects of consumer decision making (quality and satisfaction) in four different extended reality conditions; physical reality, augmented reality, virtual reality and augmented virtuality (N = 160). The results show that XR technologies differentially influence consumer decision making. More specifically, AR had no significant effect on decision quality or satisfaction; while VR was positively associated with decision quality. In addition, there was no significant interaction effect between AR and VR on decision making

Emotional Response to Extended Realities: The Effects of Augmented and Virtual Technologies in a Shopping Context

Extended reality (XR) technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are facing mixed expectations. XR is often touted to offer deeply engrossing experiences but it can also lead to cybersickness, disappointment, and frustration. Moreover, research has not kept pace with how these technologies may affect users\u27 emotions. Therefore, to understand emotions in XR, this study employs a 2 (virtual: yes vs. no) ×2 (augmented: yes vs. no) between-subject experiment (N = 162) in the shopping context. Effects on emotions are assessed by measuring changes in emotional valence and examining them using Median Tests and exploratory data analysis. Results suggest that emotional responses in XR are similar to those in a physical store. However, there is an unexpected effect of the augmented experiences where negative emotions markedly vary. Implications are presented both for retail businesses and simulations, and emotionally engaging experiences such as immersive journalism and psychotherapy

Ethical Considerations in Gamified Interactive Marketing Praxis

Gamification with various designs is becoming a mainstay of interactive marketing, used to pervasively and holistically to in value-creating marketing practices. Beyond marketing, gamification is commonly seen as a technology, the effects of which are benevolent and which is often employed for sustainable ends such as the improvement of wellbeing, health, and sustainable work. However, as gamification commonly, either more or less directly, is related to attempts at affecting customers’ psychological states and continued engagement, a critical reflection of the ethical ramifications of gamification is crucial. Hazards such as manipulation, exploitation, psychological distress, and conflicts with cultural norms are considered as potential challenges that should be observed. Nevertheless, there is a current lack of examination of gamification’s ethical implications in the marketing context. In this chapter, the authors explore the ethical concerns related to using gamification as an interactive marketing tool, and examine how consumers shape their ethical judgement towards gamification. The authors also suggest various ways to help marketers, designers, and policymakers to minimize the unethical consequences of gamification, and ensure that companies will use gamification to compete both ethically and responsibly.© The Author(s) 2023, corrected publication 2024. C. L. Wang (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Interactive Marketing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14961-0_41fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Unethical Gamification: A Literature Review

Gamification has become a mainstay approach in designing engaging systems, practices, and cultures across practically all walks of human life. However, as gamification mainly attempts to affect individual psychological states, motivations, attitudes, and behaviors, conscious consideration of ethical aspects, as well as underlying values and premises, is very much warranted. However, gamification research and practice have sprung up rather rapidly and myopically as boosted by the contemporary hype related to technology and games, which has led to the relative dismissal of ethical considerations in relation to gamification. In order to map these considerations and the current state of the discussion in gamification literature, we systematically reviewed research related to ethics, and particularly, possible identified and discussed harms of gamification. The corpus reveals that psychological distress, exploitation, lack of performance, and privacy issues are the most commonly contemplated possible harms, with different frequencies based on the game elements, types, and contexts

Virtual technologies in supporting sustainable consumption : From a single-sensory stimulus to a multi-sensory experience

Virtual technologies will change the way we consume in the digital environment in the future. Such technologies can provide consumers with a multi-sensory experience in contrast to the single-sensory stimulus in the conventional online environment. As human senses play a key role in consumption choices, we argue that virtual technologies provide greater opportunities to influence consumer decisions than the present digital environment. Consequently, we suggest that virtual technologies can potentially be used to nudge consumers towards sustainable consumption. We discuss technology-assisted sensory marketing, present the cognitive and emotive aspects of virtual reality, and propose applications of virtual reality technologies to encourage sustainable consumption. Our opinion paper concludes that virtual technologies are likely to change many aspects of human life and can have significant positive effects on the environment and climate change.© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).This work has been supported by KAUTE Foundation under Grant No. 20190003 and No. 20200531; OP Ryhmän Tutkimussäätiö ounder Grant No. 20200040, Academy of Finland under Grant No. 311346, Academy of Finland SRC CULT Programme under Grant No. 327241 (Digiconsumers) and Academy of Finland Flagship Programme under Grant No. 337653 (Forest-Human-MachineInterplay (UNITE)).fi=vertaisarvioimaton|en=nonPeerReviewed

Acceptance of Wearable Technology: A Meta-Analysis

Knowing what factors drive wearable technology adoption can help companies succeed in the competitive market of wearables. In this study, we conduct a meta-analysis on the relationships of technology acceptance of wearable technology based on the extant corpus (142 effect sizes from 44 samples collected in 11 countries). The results confirm the basic expectation that the core constructs of technology acceptance models as well as reveal that perceived enjoyment and usefulness are the most important to the adoption of wearables. However, more interestingly, a granular analysis of moderating effects shows that cultural factors including uncertainty avoidance, future orientation and humane orientation can significantly moderate the relationships between different determinants and wearable adoption. In addition, compared with other types of smart wearables, the users of smartwatches would place more weight on perceived self-expressiveness. These findings offer insights for future wearables-related research and also have practical implications for designing and developing successful wearable products

Efficient Mobile Edge Computing for Mobile Internet of Thing in 5G Networks

We study the off-line efficient mobile edge computing (EMEC) problem for a joint computing to process a task both locally and remotely with the objective of minimizing the finishing time. When computing remotely, the time will include the communication and computing time. We first describe the time model, formulate EMEC, prove NP-completeness of EMEC, and show the lower bound. We then provide an integer linear programming (ILP) based algorithm to achieve the optimal solution and give results for small-scale cases. A fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS), named Approximation Partition (AP), is provided through converting ILP to the subset sum problem. Numerical results show that both the total data length and the movement have great impact on the time for mobile edge computing. Numerical results also demonstrate that our AP algorithm obtain the finishing time, which is close to the optimal solution