Buyer Behavior in Personalized Shopping Environments

One of the most exciting aspects of electronic shopping environments (such as online stores) is that they allow firms to create personalized customer interfaces. That is, user interfaces of commercial web sites can be designed to be adaptive to the specific interests, needs, and preferences of individual shoppers at particular points in time. In principle, such personalization can yield a unique user interface for each customer, based on what the site knows, or is able to infer, about that particular shopper. As a research group, the authors have been working on advancing our understanding of buyer behavior in such personalized electronic shopping environments. This is important from both a scientific and an applied standpoint. In terms of basic research, there is a need to develop and test theories of human decision making in personalized information environments. From a more applied perspective, it is important to understand how shoppers respond to various aspects of interface personalization. In what follows, we discuss the key insights to date from an ongoing program of research on buyer behavior in personalized electronic shopping environments. We present selected findings from a number of experiments that we have conducted, and the collective results are based on primary data obtained from a total of more than 2,000 study participants. This research program has been carried out with the support of the Institute for Online Consumer Studies (IOCS) – a laboratory for computer-based experimental research in the area of consumer decision making.