Four essays on digital nudging and its effects on public health, market transaction, and consumer welfare

Abstract

Every day, we make numerous choices for good and bad on a variety of issues, ranging from meal selection and personal finance to health improvement. This decision making has been aided in contemporary times by innovations such as nudging, which is an intervention designed to affect human behaviors and offer benefits that include stress avoidance, economic gains, and often life savings. Nowadays, given that digital technologies enable individuals to stay connected to one another, marketers, and public administrators, digital nudges have been everyday phenomena that influence our lives in normal and emergency situations. The issue is that individuals frequently end up with poor choices even under assistance from digital nudges that are intended to improve their welfare as well as that of their neighbors and the society where we live together. Although the numerous scholarly works devoted to nudges, studies remain unclear and incomplete as to what these mechanisms are, why they may often result in undesirable consequences, and how they should be designed in a way that improves people’s decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. To shed light on these issues, we conducted four studies to proffer a comprehensive understanding of the effects of digital nudging on diverse dimensions of human choice. The first study describes our exploration into the influence of real-time mobile tracing alert nudging systems on public health and safety in emergency situations that threaten our health, wealth, and happiness. We look into the efficacy of mobile nudges in controlling instant population movement from infected disaster areas and how specific message content moderates the effects of mobile-based digital tracing alerts on risk reduction during the global outbreak. The second study recounts our assessment of digital nudging effects in commercial settings, with the scrutiny centered on how diverse digital influencing mechanisms affect consumers’ search, purchase, and return behaviors. We focus on the economic effects of pressure- and assurance-based nudges on post-purchase activities, including immediate, early, and late product returns. The third study documents our investigation of how the approach to partitioning digital content products affects the consumption patterns and engagement behaviors of consumers. We assess how the style in which serialized e-books are split determines the actual consumption and evaluation of such digital products. The fourth study explores how consumers’ book consumption patterns are associated with their review behaviors and how reviews generated from incomplete consumption influence subsequent sales. We investigate how the fragmented consumption of e-books is associated with review behaviors and subsequent purchases. The results drawn from four studies emphasize the necessity of the balanced utilization of digital nudging and cast valuable light on effective strategies for public safety, market transaction, and consumer welfare in rapidly changing digital environments.