Personality and the effectivity of digital nudges: an empirical study
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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Author
Date
2020
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Marketing
Language
en
Pages
57+6
Series
Abstract
Decision making isn’t always rational and fact-based. Instead, it’s often intuitive and stems from heuristics. So-called nudge theory is based on this idea. Nudges are meant to influence behaviour with the use of these heuristics and biases. In this research I study two digital nudges in a context of an online store and examine how consumer’s personality affects their effectivity. The other nudge is a discounted price with limited availability and it is based on loss aversion bias. The other one is a rating given by other customers. It is based on conformity bias. The data I use is from a web survey with a sample size of 237. In the survey, I measured respondents’ personality with Big Five personality dimensions and their behaviour with a choice-based conjoint analysis. The findings of this study are in many ways consistent with a previous literature and the results also give new insights on the individual differences in the effectivity of nudging. Openness to Experience was negatively correlated with the susceptibility to both nudges. High Conscientiousness, on the other hand, reduced susceptibility to the nudge that utilizes the conformity bias. In addition, other correlations between personality and the effectivity of the nudges were found, but those findings were not statistically significant, probably due to small sample size. Still, the results are promising for further research.Description
Thesis advisor
Falk, TomasGloukhovtsev, Alexei
Keywords
nudging, personality, e-commerce, behavioural psychology, decision making, heuristics
