Research

My research investigates the intersection of information systems and decision making. I approach this question by a number of different angles:

Gamification

How do the design elements that are common in games affect a decision maker’s thought process? I explore the utilization of features that are taken from game design elements, such as points, leaderboards, and badges (or achievements/trophies) across a number of contexts.

…and wellness

The primary thrust of my gamification research has been in wellness. In collaboration with University Parking and Transportation services, my coauthors and I ran a large-scale field experiment with several thousand bicycle riders at a large campus and tested various badge designs (“Ingredients for successful badges: evidence from a field experiment in bike commuting”, European Journal of Information Systems, 2020), as well as offering different reward levels (“Do We Need Different Levels of Badges for Users with Different Participation Levels? A Field Experiment from a Bicycle Commuting Program”, International Conference on Information Systems, 2019).

Other work in this space includes the application of lightweight online support (such as “likes” on Facebook) to the wellness context where we find that giving Kudos to people on an exercise social network helps to support exercise behavior (The Effects of Digitally Delivered Nudges in a Corporate Wellness Program), Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 2023.

Product Reviews

In the online shopping context, decision making processes are wildly different when compared to brick-and-mortar stores, especially when choosing between products. Absent an ability to physically interact with a product, product reviews become crucial for decision-making.

Here, I engage in two primary streams of research. First is determining trust in a review through the use of reviewer indcator badges (Biased but Credible: An Experimental Study of Online Reviews, International Conference on Information Systems, 2020; AIS Transactions on Human Computer Intraction, forthcoming). Second is the investigation of sorting of online reviews to better support online shoppers (under review)

Online Communities

(under review)