Purpose: This paper reviews current research on assistive consumer technologies (ACT 1.0) and discusses a series of research challenges that need to be addressed before the field can move towards tools that are more effective and more readily adopted by consumers (ACT 2.0)....

This paper examines the role of electronic recommendation agents in connection with consumers' construction of preference for multi-attribute products. Based on the notion that preferences tend to be constructive, in the sense that they may be affected by characteristics of the task and...

Electronic information can easily overwhelm people with large volumes of data. An abundance of information often strains human limits: attention, memory, motivation, or other factors. In response to this challenge, software tools that assist humans in filtering and organizing information into...

Software agents that provide consumers with personalized product recommendations based on individual-level feature-based preference models have been shown to facilitate better consumption choices while dramatically reducing the effort required to make these choices. This article examines why,...

In this paper we examine the role of skill acquisition in the development of interface loyalty from a human capital perspective. It has long been recognized that humans are able to improve task performance as a result of repeated experience with a particular task, and that this type of learning...

We introduce and test a theory of how the choices consumers make are influenced by skill-based habits of use - i.e., goal-activated automated behaviors that develop through the repeated consumption or use of a particular product. Such habits can explain how consumers become locked in to an...

How does users’ freedom of choice, or the lack thereof, affect interface preferences? The research reported in this article approaches this question from two theoretical perspectives. The first of these argues that an interface with a dominant market share benefits from the absence of...

In this paper, the authors present an information processing model of self-regulation. The model predicts that consumers with an active self-regulatory goal will tend to focus on the cost (rather than the pleasure) of consumption and, as a result, they are better able to control their behavior....

This paper examines the effect of regulatory focus on consumer satisfaction. In contrast to the disconfirmation of expectations model of satisfaction, we find that, although regulatory focus does affect consumers' expectations, the effect on satisfaction cannot be explained by differences in...

Everyday, millions of decision makers receive advice from one or more sources. Although research has addressed some of the issues concerning how people take and use advice that they are given, less is known about the psychological processes that underlie decision makers' willingness to pay for...