Behavioral Economics Through the Lens of Persuasion Context Analysis: A Review of Contributions in Leading Information Systems Journals

Abstract

As technology becomes an integral part of our everyday lives, the more crucial it is to investigate how it can be further harnessed to improve individuals' wellbeing. This involves studying users' interactions with technology, how different design techniques influence their use, and the factors that might lead to sub-optimal use of technology. Such factors include decision biases which are mostly investigated in behavioral economics research. Behavioral economics counters the arguments of standard economic theories and combines psychological theories and economics to study how people actually behave as opposed to how they should behave as rational beings. Thus, this review provides an overview of behavioral economics research in the major IS journals. The aim is to determine the extent of such research within the IS field. An electronic search of the major IS journals was conducted over an 8-year period and the findings were categorized according to the use, user and technology contexts of the persuasive systems design model. The findings reveal the need for awareness of how various behavioral economic principles (or decision biases) influence decision making in technology-mediated settings and the development of strategies to mitigate their influence.