Detecting the effect of digital nudges on customer response in e-commerce environment

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Volume Title

School of Business | Master's thesis

Date

2021

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Information and Service Management (ISM)

Language

en

Pages

67

Series

Abstract

Human decision making is not always rational. It can be influenced through different heuristics, which are the basis for nudge theory. Nudge theory provides interesting insights to topics such as governance, politics and business. When nudge theory is applied to digital setting, so-called digital nudging, although it is important for business practice, it remains as a relatively new topic in academia. This thesis aims to determine the effect of three chosen nudges on customer response in an e-commerce environment. More specifically, the current study investigates the effect of reviews, shipping information, and low stock nudges on customer response based on an experimental e-commerce platform. The response is recorded with a questionnaire with a specific focus on four dependent variables to measure the customer responses between the nudge variants. The results of the study show that individual digital nudges examined (reviews, low stock and shipping information) result in more positive customer response than no nudging at all. Additionally, the combination nudges created from the individual nudges show that when nudging is done ‘incorrectly’, digital nudging can result into less positive customer response than having no nudging at all, as the results showed significantly lower customer response for one of the examined variants. The findings of this study contribute to the research on digital nudging regarding the particular nudges it examined, but also shows significant differences in nudges that are in wide-scale use in different online shops. Thus, from a practical perspective, these results might provide interesting insights to any e-commerce manager.

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Thesis advisor

Yong, Liu
Yanging, Lin

Keywords

nudge theory, e-commerce, digital nudging, customer response

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