Product recommendation agents (RAs) assist online firms to adapt their suggested offers to users’ preferences, thereby lowering users’ decision effort. The concept of effort is central in decision-making, yet it remains unclear whether it should be regarded as a cost or as a benefit improving the odds of a better decision. Building on Social Exchange theory, we suggest that interactions between users and RAs are driven by the concepts of perceived interdependence and reciprocity. We suggest that perceived user effort decreases the perceived RA quality, whereas RA effort increases the perceived RA quality. We conducted two experimental studies across different contexts. We found that users evaluate RAs based on their own expended effort, in relation to how much effort they perceived the RA has put into the process of generating recommendations. Such an effect is attenuated by users’ familiarity with the product context. Our findings offer important insights into how online firms can improve the use of their RAs.

Many important findings and discoveries in science and everyday life are the result of serendipity, that is, the unanticipated occurrence of happy events such as the finding of valuable information. Consumers are increasingly seeking serendipity in online shopping, where information clutter and preprogramed recommendation systems can make product choice frustrating or mundane. However, it is notoriously difficult to design online shopping environments that induce it. In this study, we explore how social media affordances such as obtaining access to peer-generated content and being connected to online friends can help create the right conditions for serendipity in online shopping. We supplement this analysis with an account of two individual factors that are also likely to be instrumental in a shopping context, namely, the intensity of shoppers’ information search and their aversion to risk when faced with a product choice. Our investigation relies on a conceptualization of serendipity that has two defining elements: unexpectedness and informational value . The results of an experimental study in which we manipulated an online product search environment reveal the superiority of designs that incorporate online friendships, and these results support the positive effects of search effort and risk aversion on serendipity. This study contributes by developing a theoretical framework for the analysis of serendipity and by explaining how social commerce , that is, the integration of social media and electronic commerce , can cultivate serendipity.

This paper challenges a long-held assumption of prior research – that online word-of-mouth is anonymous and impersonal – by examining shoppers’ opinion seeking in the context of using a product review website connected to a digital social network (SN). Motivated by the need to account for the idiosyncratic resources available in each shopper’s SN, we distinguish between two types of opinion-seeking behaviours: (i) exploiting, seeking peers’ opinions in one’s core network (ie, online friends), and (ii) exploring, seeking peers’ opinions from one’s extended network (ie, strangers). Using SN theory, we specify what drives these behaviours, and how they influence shoppers’ utilitarian and hedonic experiences in an online product selection task. A free-simulation study, conducted with a restaurant review website connected to the Facebook SN, provided three key insights: (1) Exploitation has a stronger beneficial effect on shoppers’ utilitarian and hedonic experiences than exploration, (2) there is a strong positive influence of social capital (both structural and relational) on shoppers’ propensity to engage in exploitation, and (3) high social capital does not induce the expected extensive substitution of exploration with exploitation. Overall, this study enhances our understanding of online shoppers’ opinion seeking in the increasingly prevalent SN-enabled settings.

Purpose This study aims to identify antecedents to noncompliance behavior influenced by decision contexts where investments in time, effort and resources are devoted to a task – referred to as a task unlikely to be completed without violating the organization’s information security policy (ISP). Design/methodology/approach An empirical test of the suggested relationships in the proposed model was conducted through a field study using the survey method for data collection. Pre-tests, pre-study, main study and a follow-up study compose the frame of our methodology where more than 500 respondents are involved across different organizations. Findings The results confirm that the antecedents that explain the escalation of commitment behavior in terms of the effect of lost assets, such as time, effort and other resources, give us a new lens to understand noncompliance behavior; employees seem to escalate their commitments to the completion of their tasks at the expense of becoming noncompliant with ISP. Research limitations/implications One of the key areas that requires further attention from this study is to better understand the role of risk perceptions on employee behavior when dealing with value conflicts. Depending on how risk-averse or risk seeking an employee is, the model showed no significant support in either case to influence their noncompliance behavior. The authors therefore argue that employees' noncompliance may be influenced by more powerful beliefs, such as self-justification and sunk costs. Practical implications The results show that when employees are caught in tasks undergoing difficulties, they are more likely to increase noncompliance behavior. By understanding better how project obstacles result in such tasks, security managers can define new mechanisms to counter employees’ shift from compliance to noncompliance. Social implications Apart from encouraging compliance with enforcement mechanisms (using direct behavioral controls like sanctions or rewards), indirect behavior controls may also encourage compliance. The authors suggest that the ISPs should state that the organization would take positive actions toward task completion and help their employees to resolve their problems quickly. Originality/value This study is the first to tackle escalation of commitment theories and use antecedents that explain the effect of lost assets, such as time, effort and other resources can also explain noncompliance with ISP in terms of the value conflicts, where employees would often choose to forego compliance at the expense of finishing their tasks.

Insider threat is a “wicked” contemporary organizational problem. It poses significant threats to organizational operations and information security. This article reviews insider threat research and outlines key propositions to conceptualize the interpretation of dynamic human information behavior in an organizational setting, which represent an integration of trustworthiness and human sensors’ attribution in close relationships. These propositions posit that when a focal individual violates integrity‐based trust, the group can collectively attribute a shift in trustworthiness, triggering a natural peer attribution process that assigns cause to observed behavior. Group communication can thus reflect subtle changes in a focal individual's perceived trustworthiness. The ability to understand group‐based computer‐mediated communication patterns over time may become essential in safeguarding information assets and the “digital well‐being” of today's organizations. This article contributes a novel theoretical lens to examine dynamic insights on insider threat detection.

Language as a symbolic medium plays an important role in virtual communications. In a primarily linguistic environment such as cyberspace, words are an expressed form of intent and actions. We investigate the functions of words and actions in identifying behavioral anomalies of social actors to safeguard the virtual organization. Social actors are likened to “sensors” as they observe changes in a focal individual's behavior during computer‐mediated communications. Based on social psychology theories and pragmatic views of words and actions in online communications, we theorize a dyadic attribution model that helps make sense of anomalous behavior in creative online experiments. This model is then tested in an experiment. Findings show that observation of the behavioral differences between words and actions, based on either external or internal causality, can offer increased ability to detect the compromised trustworthiness of observed individuals—possibly leading to early detection of insider threat potential. The dyadic attribution model developed in this sociotechnical study can function to detect behavioral anomalies in cyberspace, and protect the operations of a virtual organization.

This paper reports on two studies that investigate the design of online product interactivity. The first study compares three different presentation formats: a video presentation and two Virtual Product Experience (VPE) presentations, namely, triggered interaction and full interaction. The findings suggest that triggered interaction VPE is more effective in enticing users to attend to and further explore the featured products than both the non-interactive video presentation and the full interaction VPE. The second study builds upon the first and focuses on two specific VPE design factors. In particular, it investigates interaction constraint (high versus low constraint) in addition to the activation mode of interaction (process-based interaction versus event-based interaction). The results reveal interesting interaction patterns between the two design factors, i.e., providing less constrained interaction performs better when process-based interaction design is adopted, but performs worse when event-based interaction is employed.

Mobile product recommendation agents (RAs) are software systems that operate on mobile handheld devices, using wireless Internet to support users' decisions en route, such as consumers' product choices in retail stores. As the demand for ubiquitous access to the web grows, potential benefits of mobile RAs have been recognized, albeit with little supporting empirical evidence. We investigate whether and how mobile RAs enhance users' decisions in retail stores by reducing the effort to make purchase decisions while augmenting the accuracy of the decisions. In addition, to identify potential design principles for mobile RAs, we compare and evaluate two interaction styles of mobile RAs: alternative-driven (RA-AL) versus attribute-driven (RA-AT) interactions. The results of a laboratory experiment conducted in a simulated store indicate that mobile RAs reduced users' perceived effort and increased accuracy of their decisions. Furthermore, RA-AL users made more accurate decisions than RA-AT users due to the RA-AL's interaction style, which was compatible with the way in which users processed information and made decisions in the store. These empirical results support the notion that mobile RAs should be designed to fit the user's task undertaken in the particular context.

This research empirically investigates the design choices that can be made to facilitate problem solving when intelligent systems fail. One way is to provide deep explanations, which are explanations that justify system actions. Another way is to manipulate system restrictiveness of the user interface. An experiment was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of deep explanation support, as well as manipulations of system restrictiveness. Results suggest that the less restrictive system was more effective for problem‐solving situations where system failure occurred. In addition, deep explanations were found to be somewhat helpful in system understanding, and this, in turn, led to improved problem‐solving performance.

With the increasing prevalence of online shopping, many companies have begun to provide "live help" functions, through instant messaging or text chatting, on their Web sites to facilitate interactions between online consumers and customer service representatives (CSRs). The continuing reliance of these functions on text-based communication limits nonverbal communication with consumers and the social contexts for the information conveyed. However, with the help of emerging multimedia technologies, companies can now use computer-generated voice and humanoid avatars to embody CSRs, thus enriching the interactive experiences of their customers. In this study, a laboratory experiment was conducted to empirically test the effects of text-to-speech (TTS) voice and 3-dimensional (3D) avatars on consumer trust toward CSRs. TTS voice was implemented to deliver answers aloud. A 3D avatar served as the humanoid representation of a CSR. The results demonstrated that the presence of TTS voice significantly increases consumers' cognitive and emotional trust toward the CSR. These findings offer practitioners guidelines to improve the interface design of real-time human-to-human communications for e-commerce Web sites.

Expansion and growth of online shopping has led many companies to provide real-time communications on their Web sites to facilitate human-to-human interaction between service representatives and customers. The current study analyzes the interface design of such Live Help functions. More specifically, it attempts to understand whether or not the implementation of Text-To-Speech (TTS) voice communication and 3D avatars in the user interface of Live Help affects consumers' views of their own interactions with a service person.A laboratory experiment was designed to empirically test the hypotheses that TTS voice communication and 3D avatars can significantly affect consumers' perceptions of presence and flow. A 2*3 full factorial design was used (assessing three options for the use of voice and text, and two options for the use of avatars). The results of the experiment demonstrate that the presence of TTS voice significantly increases consumers' perceptions of flow (a construct depicting a user's interaction with a computer as playful and exploratory), while 3D avatars enhance consumers' feelings of telepresence (a user's experience of seeming to be present in a remote environment by means of a communication medium). These findings offer practitioners guidelines on how to improve interface designs for real-time human-to-human communications on electronic commerce Web sites.

Recommendation agents (RAs) help customers to cope with information complexity and information overload in electronic commerce (ecommerce). This paper addresses the changes of trust/distrust structures (cognitive vs. emotional components) and trust/distrust formation processes from the initial interaction between customers and an RA to the subsequent repeated interactions. This paper contributes theoretically by proposing two conceptual models to analyze trust/distrust formation processes. It contributes empirically by revealing that the numbers of processes generating cognitive and emotional trust/distrust drop significantly from the initial interaction to the second interaction, the numbers then stabilize. In contrast, the percentage distribution of these processes remains the same during repeated interactions. The same rule holds for trust/distrust formation processes. These results explain why the initial interaction is the critical time for trust/distrust formation. This study calls for future research on RA design aiming at trust building and distrust prevention for customers experiencing RAs for the first time.

This research investigates techniques that can improve the explanatory power of knowledge-based systems (KBS). Two types of enhancements are considered. First, deep explanations are textual descriptions that explain the underlying domain principles associated with system recommendations. Second, graphical hierarchies are used to represent the structure of the KBS rule base so that end-users can more easily visualize how a KBS reaches system recommendations. The experimental method was employed to investigate the effectiveness of the deep explanations and the hierarchic models. A 2/spl times/2 factorial design was used: one factor, interface type, is whether a subject interacted with a hierarchic interface or an informationally-equivalent flat interface; the second factor, explanations provision, is whether a subject was provided with deep explanation support or not. Multiple methods of measurements were employed to understand the effects of different treatments in the study. Problem-solving performance, as assessed by a series of tasks, and execution time were measured. Short answer questions were administered to all subjects to understand user preferences. Finally, to gain a richer understanding of problem-solving processes, all subject actions were captured in a computer log. From these logs, problem-solving strategies were reconstructed and analyzed. We found support for the benefits associated with interfaces having greater explanatory power according to the task-technology fit perspective: problem-solving performance was improved on certain tasks, and the correct problem-solving strategies were more likely to be adopted by subjects when they were provided with the appropriate support.

Norman proposed a model describing the sequence of user activities involved in human-computer interaction. Through this model, Norman provides a rationale for why direct-manipulation interfaces may be preferred to other design alternatives. Based on action identification theory we developed several hypotheses about the operations of Norman's model and tested them in a laboratory experiment. The results show that users of a direct-manipulation interface and a menu-based interface did not differ in the total amount of time used to perform a task. However, with the direct-manipulation interface, more time is devoted to performing motor actions , but this is offset by shorter nonmotor time . Furthermore, there are significant interactions between task familiarity, instructions, and the type of interface, indicating that Norman's model may not hold under all conditions.

Concerns the role of effort and accuracy in choice tasks. The paper examines the role of computer-based decision aids in reducing cognitive effort where the decision maker experiences heavy information load. It is argued that specific features can be incorporated within a set of aids that alter the effort required to implement a particular strategy relative to other strategies, and that this influences strategy selection. Subjects were given aids to reduce cognitive effort associated with preferential choice strategies. In particular, the aids provided varying levels of support for the processing associated with either elimination by aspects (EBA) or additive difference (AD) strategies. The study examined changes in operators which represent the subcomponents or building blocks of the strategies. A repeated measures design was utilized whereby 32 subjects performed a 30 alternative apartment selection task over two trials. Analysis of the data was based on the coding of concurrent verbal protocols which described the subjects' problem solving strategies. The results show that aids which reduce the effort associated with the EBA strategy induce behaviors associated with EBA. More importantly, there was an interaction effect caused by the behavior of subjects provided with support for an AD but not for an elimination by aspects strategy. These subjects employed more operations which are unique to the AD strategy. These results are consistent with earlier studies in indicating that decision makers adapt to the aids available to them so as to maintain low overall levels of effort expenditure. They further indicate that aids can be designed to overcome constraining task limitations.>

A laboratory experiment was conducted to assess the influence of graphical and color-enhanced information presentation on information use and decision quality in a simulation setting. This is the third in a series of studies examining the effects of colors and graphics in a managerial decision-making task. The findings reported in this article indicate that graphical presentations are more useful when evaluating information in order to determine promising directions in the search for an optimal solution, but when the task requires the determination of exact data values for computational purposes, graphical reports are less useful than tabular ones. Benefits of color include taking fewer iterations to complete the task. However, these benefits are associated more strongly with the graphical report as indicated by the significantly higher use of color-enhanced graphical reports over monochromatic ones. The benefits of color are also restricted to the early stages in the decision task, with color graphic report usage dropping sharply over time.

A computer-based management information system consists of two major components: the machine and the human user. The designers of these systems often do not consider the capabilities and inadequacies of the human component. As a consequence, the computer with its vast information processing abilities tends to overload the human user. This leads to a waste of computing resources and interferes with the proper functioning of the human element. Various models of human information processing behavior are discussed to provide some suggestions for information system design. The topics covered include human abilities to integrate information and judge probabilistic information accurately, the factors which cause information overload, and individual differences in information handling abilities.