The soaring number of privacy breaches has prompted affected firms to learn how to effectively recover damaged customer relationships. In this study we develop and test a model that explains how online customer behavior is influenced by a firm's recovery endeavors when privacy breaches occur. Drawing on a service recovery perspective, we integrate the notions of justice perceptions and psychological responses into a theoretical framework. The proposed model was tested against data collected from 1,007 online customers based on a hypothetical scenario. Results show that three types of justice perceptions, distributive, procedural, and interactional justice, jointly affect psychological responsesÑthat is, perceived breach and feelings of violation. In addition, psychological responses were shown to be important in shaping postincident outcomes such as post-word of mouth and post-likelihood of switching. The study gives researchers and practitioners a useful conceptual tool for analyzing the effectiveness of organizational practices in recovering customer relationship after privacy breaches. > >
Online social networks greatly facilitate social exchange among friends. At times, for amusement, individuals may be targeted by friends' playful teases, which often involve exposing individuals' private embarrassing information, such as information that reveals their past indecent behavior, mischief, or clumsiness. Although individuals sometimes do enjoy the humor, they might also be offended by the involuntary exposure. Drawing on social exchange theory, this paper elucidates the consequences of an embarrassing exposure in online social networks. Specifically, this study examines the effects of information dissemination and network commonality on individuals' exchange assessment as well as how this assessment shapes their behavioral responses. The results of our experiment provide strong evidence that information dissemination and network commonality jointly influence individuals' perceived privacy invasion and perceived relationship bonding. In addition, whereas perceived privacy invasion increases transactional avoidance, it reduces approach behavior. Furthermore, whereas perceived relationship bonding impedes both transactional avoidance and interpersonal avoidance, it leads to approach behavior. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
Community-based question-and-answer (Q&A) websites have become increasingly popular in recent years as an alternative to general-purpose Web search engines for open-ended complex questions. Despite their unique contextual characteristics, only a handful of Q&A websites have been successful in sustaining members' active participation that, unlike lurking, consists of not only posting questions but also answering others' inquiries. Because the specific design of the information technology artifacts on Q&A websites can influence their level of success, studying leading Q&A communities such as Yahoo! Answers (YA) provides insights into more effective design mechanisms. We tested a goal-oriented action framework using data from 2,920 YA users, and found that active online participation is largely driven by artifacts (e.g., incentives), membership (e.g., levels of membership and tenure), and habit (e.g., past behavior). This study contributes to the information systems literature by showing that active participation can be understood as the setting, pursuit, and automatic activation of goals. > >
The objective of this work is to examine various psychological forces underlying the behavior of people’s online gambling, an increasingly popular form of entertainment in the gaming industry. Drawing on extant theories, we first developed a model of how cumulative outcomes, recent outcomes, and prior use affect online gambling behavior differently. We empirically tested the model using longitudinal panel data collected over eight months from 22,304 actual users of a gambling website. The results of a multilevel panel data analysis strongly supported our hypotheses. First, consistent with gambling theory, individuals' online gambling was found to increase with any increase in a cumulative net gain or cumulative net loss. Second, as the availability heuristic prescribes, a recent loss reduced online gambling, whereas a recent gain increased it. Third, consistent with the literature on repeated behavior, regular use and extended use moderated the relationship between current and subsequent gambling. Taken together, the present study clarifies how people react differently to immediate and cumulative outcomes and also how regular use and extended use facilitate routine behavior in the context of online gambling. In general, our findings suggest that the three perspectives, i.e., gambling theory, the availability heuristic, and repeated behavior, should be taken into account to understand online gambling, which is in essence a series of risk-taking attempts with the potential of eventually becoming routine behavior. This study is expected to offer valuable insights into other types of online games that could engage people in risking real or cyber money and, at the same time, could be easily enmeshed with everyday life (e.g., fantasy sports, online virtual worlds).
Online communities are new social structures dependent on modern information technology, and they face equally modern challenges. Although satisfied members regularly consume content, it is considerably harder to coax them to contribute new content and help recruit others because they face unprecedented social comparison and criticism. We propose that engagement—a concept only abstractly alluded to in information systems research—is the key to active participation in these unique sociotechnical environments. We constructed and tested a framework that demonstrates what engagement is, where it comes from, and how it powerfully explains both knowledge contribution and word of mouth. Our results show that members primarily contribute to and revisit an online community from a sense of engagement. Nonetheless, word of mouth is partly influenced by prior satisfaction. Therefore, engagement and satisfaction appear to be parallel mediating forces at work in online communities. Both mediators arise from a sense of communal identity and knowledge self-efficacy, but engagement also emerges from validation of self-identity. Nevertheless, we also found signs that the contributions of the most knowledgeable users are not purely from engagement, but also from a competing sense of self-efficacy. Our findings significantly contribute to the area of information systems by highlighting that engagement is a concrete phenomenon on its own, and it can be directly modeled and must be carefully managed.
Reputation systems have been recognized as successful online review communities and word-of-mouth channels. Our study draws upon the elaboration likelihood model to analyze the extent that the characteristics of reviewers and their early reviews reduce or worsen the bias of subsequent online reviews. Investigating the sources of this bias and ways to mitigate it is of considerable importance given the previously established significant impact of online reviews on consumers' purchasing decisions and on businesses' profitability. Based on a panel data set of 744 individual consumers collected from Yelp, we used the Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation method to develop and empirically test a system of simultaneous models of consumer review behavior. Our results reveal that male reviewers or those who lack experience, geographic mobility, or social connectedness are more prone to being influenced by prior reviews. We also found that longer and more frequent reviews can reduce online reviews' biases. This paper is among the first to examine the moderating effects of reviewer and review characteristics on the relationship between prior reviews and subsequent reviews. Practically, this study offers businesses effective customer relationship management strategies to improve their reputations and expand their clientele.
The highly competitive and rapidly changing market for online services is becoming increasingly effective at locking users in through the coercive effects of switching costs. Although the information systems field increasingly recognizes that switching costs plays a big part in enforcing loyalty, little is known about what factors users regard as switching costs or why they perceive these costs. Consequently, it is hard for online services to know what lock-in strategies to use and when to apply them. We address this problem by first developing a theory-driven structure of online users' perceived switching costs that distinguishes between vendor-related and user-related factors. We then propose that important antecedent influences on switching costs from economic value, technical self-efficacy, and past investments are more complex and intertwined than previously thought. We empirically validated the proposed model using data collected from home users of Internet service providers. Our findings demonstrate that an online service's economic value more heavily influences users' perceptions of vendor-related switching costs than does technical self-efficacy. However, users' technical abilities outweigh economic value in influencing user-related switching costs. Furthermore, although we confirmed the commonly held notion that deeply invested users are generally more vulnerable to lockin, we also found that this relationship is contingent on users' technical abilities. Finally, we found that our multidimensional measure of switching costs is a valid predictor of user loyalty and is more powerful than previous global measures. Overall, this study uncovered a finer network of switching-cost production than had been previously established and suggests a new approach to modeling and exploiting online users' perceived switching costs.
Sustained website traffic through consumers' patronage at the post-adoption stages is known as a key to the survival of an online service provider. Although a firm's survival depends much on repeated use, whether or not a firm survives is also influenced by a variety of other behavioral outcomes that include, but are not limited to, word-of-mouth, willingness to pay, and inattentiveness to alternatives. Whereas post-adoption research has recently paid attention to repeated use, the information systems field still lacks a systematic investigation into other behavioral outcomes that transcend mere usage. In an attempt to extend the horizons of post-adoption research, we develop and test a model that explains post-adoption behaviors in the context of online services. First, drawing on a dual model of relationship maintenance in consumer behavior research, we propose a conceptual framework to study and explain online consumer behavior. In particular, our model predicts that two contrasting mechanisms, that is, dedication and constraint, are the main drivers of post-adoption phenomena (i.e., consumers' post-adoption reactions to online services--beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors). We empirically test the proposed dual model through the use of data collected from 510 users of online portals. The results of structural equation modeling analysis indicate that, as expected, the dedication- and constraint- based mechanisms simultaneously, yet differentially, determine online consumer behavior. In general, our findings suggest that it is essential in examining the complex nature of post-adoption phenomena to take into account the interplay of the dedication- and constraint-based mechanisms.
The integrative framework of technology use (IFTU) posits that to fully explain post-adoption phenomena, four mechanisms--namely, reason-oriented action, sequential updating feedback, and habit--should be taken into account simultaneously in a unified model. Although IFTU sheds light on the four mechanisms underlying technology use, it lacks a coherent theoretical explanation for the underlying force that leads to the four mechanisms. To offer a more generalized and richer description of the four mechanisms, this study extends IFTU by drawing on the process model of memory in cognitive psychology. In addition, based on the extended IFTU paradigm, a three-wave panel model is developed that incorporates not only proximal effects but also distal effects of the four mechanisms on post-adoption phenomena. Three different sets of data (n=195, 160, and 342, respectively) are used to test the proposed model. The results of data analysis show that, as expected, the four mechanisms have proximal effects on subsequent evaluations and behavior. Furthermore, consistent with the memory perspective, the sequential updating and habit mechanisms are found to have distal effects on post-adoption phenomena even after controlling for their proximal effects. Overall, the findings of this study indicate that the memory perspective offers not only a seamless explanation of the four mechanisms underlying technology use but also yields deeper insights that can be validated only through a three-or-more-wave panel study. This research contributes to the literature by demonstrating that the extended IFTU paradigm has the potential to serve as a coherent theoretical framework on post-adoption phenomena in which prior experiences are internalized into memories, which in turn regulate later experiences.
Although Internet users are expected to respond in various ways to privacy threats from online companies, little attention has been paid so far to the complex nature of how users respond to these threats. This paper has two specific goals in its effort to fill this gap in the literature. The first, so that these outcomes can be systematically investigated, is to develop a taxonomy of information privacy-protective responses (IPPR). This taxonomy consists of six types of behavioral responses--refusal, misrepresentation, removal, negative word-of-mouth, complaining directly to online companies, and complaining indirectly to third-party organizations--that are classified into three categories: information provision, private action, and public action. Our second goal is to develop a nomological model with several salient antecedents--concerns for information privacy, perceived justice, and societal benefits from complaining--of IPPR, and to show how the antecedents differentially affect the six types of IPPR. The nomological model is tested with data collected from 523 Internet users. The results indicate that some discernible patterns emerge in the relationships between the antecedents and the three groups of IPPR. These patterns enable researchers to better understand why a certain type of IPPR is similar to or distinct from other types of IPPR. Such an understanding could enable researchers to analyze a variety of behavioral responses to information privacy threats in a fairly systematic manner. Overall, this paper contributes to researchers' theory-building efforts in the area of information privacy by breaking new ground for the study of individuals' responses to information privacy threats.
Although much research has examined conscious use, which involves deliberate evaluation and decision making, we know less about automatic use, which occurs spontaneously with little conscious effort. The objective of this study is to compare two contrasting views in the literature on the nature of automatic use, namely, the habit/automaticity perspective (HAP) and the instant activation perspective (IAP). According to HAP, automatic use occurs because of the force of habit/automaticity without the formation of evaluations and intention; thus, past use--which is a proxy for habit/automaticity--is believed to weaken the evaluations-intention-usage relationship. In contrast, IAP posits that automatic use is simply an expedited form of conscious use; accordingly, as with conscious use, automatic use is still a function of evaluations/intention, so past use will not weaken the evaluations-intention-usage relationship. We tested the competing hypotheses using 2,075 cross-sectional and 990 longitudinal responses from actual users of two online news sites. Our results show that the evaluations-intention-usage relationship is generally weaker among heavier users than among lighter users. These findings suggest that with an increase in past use, user behavior becomes less evaluative and less intentional, in support of the argument that automatic use is driven more by habit/automaticity than by instant activation of cognitions. Overall, this research shows an initial piece of evidence of the moderating role of past use in postadoption phenomena, and it is expected to help the information systems community systematically investigate the important yet underexplored subject of habit/automaticity.
The lack of consumer confidence in information privacy has been identified as a major problem hampering the growth of e-commerce. Despite the importance of understanding the nature of online consumers' concerns for information privacy, this topic has received little attention in the information systems community. To fill the gap in the literature, this article focuses on three distinct, yet closely related, issues. First, drawing on social contract theory, we offer a theoretical framework on the dimensionality of Internet users' information privacy concerns (IUIPC). Second, we attempt to operationalize the multidimensional notion of IUIPC using a second-order construct, and we develop a scale for it. Third, we propose and test a causal model on the relationship between IUIPC and behavioral intention toward releasing personal information at the request of a marketer. We conducted two separate field surveys and collected data from 742 household respondents in one-on-one, face-to-face interviews. The results of this study indicate that the second-order IUIPC factor, which consists of three first-order dimensions -- namely, collection, control, and awareness -- exhibited desirable psychometric properties in the context of online privacy. In addition, we found that the causal model centering on IUIPC fits the data satisfactorily and explains a large amount of variance in behavioral intention, suggesting that the proposed model will serve as a useful tool for analyzing online consumers' reactions to various privacy threats on the Internet.