Life on Earth requires healthy ecosystems. As environmental degradation and climate change accelerate, we need innovative digital solutions to foster more sustainable development. Information systems play a critical role in enabling sustainable behaviors at the individual level. However, existing sustainable human-computer interaction research has faced criticism for relying heavily on persuasive technologies that overlook user diversity and the complexity of everyday life. In this paper, we develop design principles for sustainable information systems that help individual users engage in responsible consumption with a focus on reducing food waste—a globally relevant and underexplored issue aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 12.3. We use social cognitive theory and user archetypes as theoretical lens and apply established methods for deriving design principles. Based on an in-depth case study, we further refine design principles from both users’ and system providers’ perspective. Our study contributes to the sustainable human-computer interaction literature by presenting three meta-requirements and six design principles that accommodate diverse user motivations and behaviors. These principles move beyond one-size-fits-all persuasive strategies and offer actionable guidance for designing sustainable information systems that address the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability.
Despite several advantages over traditional donation fundraising models, donation crowdfunding is one of the smallest crowdfunding models by volume worldwide. Two typical challenges that donation crowdfunding faces are attaining legitimacy from potential donors and motivating potential donors to contribute. A fundraiser’s narrative and its linguistic style play an instrumental role in overcoming these challenges. However, academic research on the link between linguistic styles in fundraisers' narratives and potential donors' altruistic motivation remains in its infancy and is scarce in the donation crowdfunding literature. To bridge this gap, we use the multidimensional view of altruism to understand how fundraisers' narrative affects potential donors' intention to donate by provoking altruistic motivation in general and its seven dimensions in particular. Our findings from our experiment provide insights for fundraisers, crowdfunding platform designers, and scholars. In the donation crowdfunding context, our findings explain how linguistic narrative styles (social, emotional, and religious) may bring a change in potential donors' mixed altruistic motives (pure and pseudo-altruistic motives), which influence potential donors’ intention to donate.
Researchers and practitioners across multiple disciplines have paid significant attention to the ways individuals search for and use information. As tools evolve, so do users’ strategies. For the last decade or more, research has focused on information-acquisition approaches via search engines. However, as more advanced tools built on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) have emerged, the way individuals search for information online has changed, which requires updates to previous information behavior models. We explore these changes by examining how 455 students at a university in the United States identified and attempted to satisfy information needs with a new generative AI tool— ChatGPT—during the first full semester of its public availability in early 2023. This new information behavior departs from previous search-focused models in that it underscores GenAI’s iterative nature and highlights the possibilities of human-machine interaction for information acquisition and generation. Specifically, we highlight four key informational needs that trigger a GenAI interaction (retrieval, generation, revision, and evaluation), and we identify three distinct ways (refinement, contextual, and reset) in which searchers iteratively interact with ChatGPT to arrive at the desired information—a phenomenon we term “cycling”.
Drawing on the persuasion and branded-entertainment literature and using an integrative theoretical lens for understanding in-game advertising (IGA) effectiveness, we conducted a dual experimental study to elucidate the mechanisms for persuasion and branding in IGA. Specifically, we studied the varying impacts of prominent and subtle brand placements and love for online games on IGA’s persuasive intent and their possible indirect influence on users’ brand recall, brand attitude, and brand advocacy. We also analyze how IGA-game uniqueness and users’ need for cognition moderate brand recall and brand attitudes. Results from the first study show that prominent brand placements enhance the identification of persuasive intent more than subtle brand placements and that love for playing online games helps individuals identify IGA persuasive intent. Results from the second study demonstrate that IGA that has a congruent and prominently placed brand enhances brand recall, IGA that has an incongruent and prominently placed brand improves brand attitude, and need for cognition moderates both relationships. This paper enriches the marketing field by demonstrating the relevance of an emerging concept called love for playing online games in the gamified advertising context and supports attention and persuasion models. Additionally, results suggest that brand managers need to use IGA-related and user-related factors in the right combinations to effectively persuade users through IGA.
The metaverse, driven by advances in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and artificial intelligence (AI), is reshaping digital marketing while raising complex ethical challenges. This systematic literature review analyzes fifty peer-reviewed literature reviews (2019-2024) retrieved from Scopus and AISeL, focusing on digital marketing, branding, and the metaverse. The review maps objectives, themes, contribution types, publication outlets, and methodologies, showing that most contributions are theoretical (68%), followed by empirical (16%), methodological (12%), and opinionbased (4%), with PRISMA emerging as the dominant reporting standard. Through meta-synthesis, we identify and analyze four core ethical dimensions: privacy, transparency, authenticity, and fairness. By integrating insights across fragmented domains, the review highlights how these ethical challenges intersect and require interdisciplinary responses involving marketers, platform providers, policymakers, and consumers. We advance theoretical implications by linking immersive marketing to foundational perspectives such as privacy theory, media richness, self-determination, and algorithmic transparency, while also outlining nine actionable implications for practice and future research. In doing so, this review of reviews establishes a foundation for responsible, inclusive, and sustainable digital marketing in the metaverse.
