Izak Benbasat

University of British Columbia | UBC · Division of Accounting

People have conflicting responses for support from algorithms or humans in decision-making. On the one hand, they fail to benefit from algorithms due to algorithm aversion, as they reject decisions provided by algorithms more frequently than those made by humans. On the other hand, many prefer algorithmic over human advice, an effect of algorithm a...

Ecommerce websites increasingly provide predictive analytics-based advice (PAA), such as advice about future potential price reductions. Establishing consumer-trust in these advice-giving systems imposes unique and novel challenges. First, PAA about future alternatives that can benefit the consumer appears to inherently contradict the business goal...

Research on recommendation agents (RAs) originally focused on interactive RAs, which rely on explicit methods, i.e., eliciting user-provided inputs to learn about consumers’ needs and preferences. Recently, due to the availability of large amounts of data about individuals, the focus shifted toward non-interactive RAs that use implicit methods rath...

The body of research examining the board’s involvement in information technology governance (ITG) is expanding. While there is a growing consensus on the importance of this phenomena, the focal concept is still shrouded in confusion. Drawing upon theories on corporate governance, we develop a unifying analytical (Type 1) theory delineating the boar...

Product recommendation agents (RAs) assist online firms to adapt their suggested offers to users’ preferences, thereby lowering users’ decision effort. The concept of effort is central in decision-making, yet it remains unclear whether it should be regarded as a cost or as a benefit improving the odds of a better decision. Building on Social Exchan...

Virtual advisors (VA) are tools that assist users in making decisions. Using VAs necessitates the disclosure of personal information, especially when they are employed in personalized contexts such as healthcare, where disclosure is vital to providing valid and accurate advice. Yet, extant research has largely overlooked the factors that encourage...

There has been extensive research in Information Systems (IS) regarding the individual-level beliefs that are germane to technology usage. Theories like the technology acceptance model, user satisfaction, service quality, the diffusion of innovations theory, and others identify a wide variety of influential beliefs, such as those that target proper...

When using mobile apps that extensively collect user information, privacy uncertainty, which is consumers’ difficulty in assessing the privacy of the data they entrust to others, is a major concern. Using a simulated app-buying experiment, we find that privacy uncertainty, which is mainly driven by uncertainty about what data are collected and how...

Most previous studies about online product recommendation sources (recommendation agents [RAs], consumers, and experts) have been limited to the evaluation by a single source on a website. Thus, the relative influence of convergent recommendations from different sources on consumers’ acceptance of the advice remains largely unknown. We draw upon an...

With technological developments in artificial intelligence, algorithms are increasingly capable to perform tasks that were considered to be unique for humans. However, literature suggests that although algorithms are often superior in performance, users are reluctant to interact with algorithms instead of human agents – a phenomenon known as algori...

This paper investigates service functionality in the domain of B2B platform assimilation from the buyer’s perspective. Using a customer service life cycle framework, we identified five dimensions of service functionality, namely, information search, negotiation, acquisition, ownership, and retirement. We theorize that the importance of these dimens...

Purpose This article reports the results from a panel discussion held at the 2019 European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) on the use of technology-based autonomous agents in collaborative work. Design/methodology/approach The panelists (Drs Izak Benbasat, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Stefan Morana, and Stefan Seidel) presented ideas related to a...

Purpose: This article reports the results from a panel discussion held at the 2019 European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) on the use of technology-based autonomous agents in collaborative work. Approach: The panelists (Drs. presented ideas related to affective and cognitive implications of using autonomous technology-based agents in term...

Recommendation agents (or decision aids) are prevalent in technology-mediated environments. Evidence suggests that people prefer to interact with anthropomorphic recommendation agents with human-like interfaces (avatars) that are demographically similar to them in terms of ethnicity and gender. Several competing theories in the literature have trie...

Fostering the conversion of free users to premium subscribers and retaining those premium users are critical objectives for freemium service providers. Building on consumer value theory, we empirically examine the differences between basic and premium users in terms of the emotional, functional, social, epistemic, and economic values driving basic...

Grounded in the aging and complexity literature, this experimental study investigated the moderating role of individuals' cognitive age on the impact of recommendation agent (RA) comprehensiveness (i.e., amount of detail involved in using an RA) on users' perceptions regarding RA complexity and RA usefulness. An experiment involving 140 online shop...

An increasing number of businesses and consumers talk about, invest, and engage in social commerce, which is a form of commerce mediated by social media. Despite the growing recognition and adoption of social commerce, its practice is often driven by fast-paced technological evolutions, hype, and ad-hoc business cases. In parallel, social commerce...

Purpose Self-promotion on social networking sites (SNSs) is a controversial issue as it has been attributed to various positive and negative consequences. To better understand the reasons for the mixed consequences and the nature of self-promotion on SNSs, the purpose of this paper is to theorize and empirically investigate the duality of SNS self...

Many important findings and discoveries in science and everyday life are the result of serendipity, that is, the unanticipated occurrence of happy events such as the finding of valuable information. Consumers are increasingly seeking serendipity in online shopping, where information clutter and preprogramed recommendation systems can make product c...

This paper challenges a long-held assumption of prior research – that online word-of-mouth is anonymous and impersonal – by examining shoppers’ opinion seeking in the context of using a product review website connected to a digital social network (SN). Motivated by the need to account for the idiosyncratic resources available in each shopper’s SN,...

Purpose This study aims to identify antecedents to noncompliance behaviour influenced by decision contexts where investments in time, effort, and resources are devoted to a task – referred to as a task unlikely to be completed without violating the organization’s information security policy (ISP). Design/methodology/approach An empirical test of...

B.J. Fogg's Functional Triad shows the manner in which computing technologies can persuade people by playing 3 different functional roles, namely, as tools, media, or social actors. However, the effects of user perceptions of these 3 functional roles are largely unknown. We advance Fogg's framework by developing a conceptual model to explain how a...

To assist consumers in product search and selection while shopping online, many e-commerce retailers have implemented web-based product recommendation agents (PRAs). However, consumers are empowered to the extent that the PRAs provide true personalization by recommending products based solely on, and thus best representing, consumers' preferences....

Several online businesses consider integrating social network functionalities into their online store, thus creating digital social shopping networks (DSNs). Because friends tend to be trusted or have similar interests, one often expects that shoppers will leverage their connections to simplify choice making and enhance the chances of finding well-...

Insider threat is a “wicked” contemporary organizational problem. It poses significant threats to organizational operations and information security. This article reviews insider threat research and outlines key propositions to conceptualize the interpretation of dynamic human information behavior in an organizational setting, which represent an in...

Most extant research into product recommendations focuses on how advice from recommendation agents (RAs), consumers, or experts facilitates an initial (or single-stage) screening of available products and provides relevant product recommendations. The literature has largely overlooked the possibility and effects of the second stage of product advic...

With the prevalence of data online, consumers increasingly shop not only for the product that best fits their needs, but also for the best time to purchase the product in order to reduce its cost. In line with this behavior, ecommerce websites often not only offer products, but also provide analytics based statements and recommendations relating to...

Users are increasingly sharing their product interests and experiences with others on e-commerce websites. For example, users can “tag” products using their own words, and these “product tags” then serve as navigation cues for other users who want to search for products. Also, socially endorsed information contributors are sometimes highlighted on...

Trust is the enabler of social interaction. Although the origins of research on trust traditionally lie outside the Information Systems (IS) domain, the importance of trust for IS research rapidly grew in the late 1990s, and it is still growing with the increasing ubiquity and advancement of technology in organizations, virtual teams, online market...

competence, integrity, and benevolence are the three key trusting beliefs that are widely acknowledged in the trust literature. Drawing on users’ different dispositional attribution of these trusting beliefs, we investigate the different influence of two sets of experiential reasons on the competence belief versus the benevolence and integrity beli...

Online product recommendation agents (RAs) utilize rational and social appeals to enhance their persuasive power. However, the underlying mechanisms of how these various appeals work are still not clear. In this study, a laboratory experiment was conducted to examine the differential effects of explanation facilities and avatar interfaces as instan...

E-commerce service failures have been the bane of e-commerce, compelling customers to either abandon transactions entirely or switch to traditional brick-and-mortar establishments. Yet, there is a paucity of studies that investigates how such failures manifest on e-commerce websites and their impact on consumers. This paper, therefore, synthesizes...

The increasing adoption of product recommendation agents (PRAs) by e-commerce merchants makes it an important area of study for information systems researchers. PRAs are a type of Web personalization technology that provides individual consumers with product recommendations based on their product-related needs and preferences expressed explicitly o...

Despite all the studies on alignment in the past 30 years, alignment is still CIOs’ top concern, denoting the lack of prescriptive studies on antecedents of alignment. Particularly, shared language between CIO and top management team is one of the most important yet neglected antecedent of alignment. While previous studies suggest CIOs avoid techni...

Research findings on how participation in social networking sites (SNSs) affects users’ subjective well-being are equivocal. Some studies suggest a positive impact of SNSs on users’ life satisfaction and mood, whereas others report undesirable consequences such as depressive symptoms and anxiety. However, whereas the factors behind the positive eff...

Wixom and Todd (2005) integrated the user satisfaction and the technology acceptance literatures to theorize about and account for the influence of the information technology artifact on usage. Based on Wixom and Todd's integrated model of technology usage, we propose the 3Q model by investigating the role of service quality (SQ), in addition to sy...

To offer theoretical explanations of why differences exist in the level of information security control resources (ISCR) among organizations, we develop a research model by applying insights obtained from resource-based theory of the firm and institutional theory. The results, based on data collected through a survey of 241 organizations, generally...

This work investigates the effects of three different online product presentation formats, namely, a noninteractive video presentation and two virtual product experience (VPE) presentations (full interaction and restricted interaction), on engaging users in online product experience as well as enticing users to try products offline. The experimenta...

As organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on Information Technologies (IT) to run their business processes, they are also becoming more susceptible to its discontinuity. Anecdotal evident exists for many cases of IT service interruption that resulted in strategic consequences such as financial losses, negative stock market reactions, rep...

Language as a symbolic medium plays an important role in virtual communications. In a primarily linguistic environment such as cyberspace, words are an expressed form of intent and actions. We investigate the functions of words and actions in identifying behavioral anomalies of social actors to safeguard the virtual organization. Social actors are...

That recommendation agents (RAs) can substantially improve consumers’ decision-making is well understood. Far less understood is the influence of specific design attributes of the RA interface on decision making and other outcome measures. We investigate a novel design for an RA interface that enables it to interactively demonstrate trade-offs amon...

Online retailers are increasingly providing service technologies, such as online recommendation agents and live help, to assist customers with their online shopping. Despite the prevalence of these service technologies and the scholarly recognition of their importance, surprisingly little empirical research has examined the fundamental differences...

The universalistic perspective research on employing a unidimensional knowledge management (KM) strategy has yielded conflicting findings and recommendations under different contexts. This study proposes a contingency model for investigating the effects of KM strategies on KM performance to compromise these contradictions. Drawing on knowledge-base...

It has been widely known that employees pose insider threats to the information and technology resources of an organization. In this paper, we develop a model to explain insiders' intentional violation of the requirements of an information security policy. We propose sunk cost as a mediating factor. We test our research model on data collected from...

Five years have passed since the publication of our MISQ 2007 paper on the use, characteristics, and impact of e-commerce product recommendation agents (RAs). We are interested to learn how the research on e-commerce product RAs has progressed since then. More specifically, we are interested to find out whether the conceptual model that we have dev...

Online recommendation agents (RAs) are increasingly being made available to consumers to facilitate their online shopping decision making. However, some customers may perceive difficulty in using online RAs if they are too complex, particularly older adults who experience limitations in their cognitive abilities. Grounded in the theory of reasoned...

Online shoppers are increasingly embedded into social networks via digital platforms in which they can use social connections as a means to discover and learn about products. In these settings, consumers do not start on equal informational grounds because their ability to reach products and opinions depends on where they are located in the network....

Human Computer Interaction(HCI) or Human Factors studies in MIS are concerned with the ways humans interact with information, technologies, and tasks, especially in business, managerial, organizational, and cultural contexts. This article describes the existence and importance of HCI research in the MIS discipline, its historical development, some...

Wixom and Todd (2005) integrated the user satisfaction and the technology acceptance literatures to theorize about and account for the influence of the information technology artifact on usage. Based on Wixom and Todd’s integrated model of technology usage, we propose the 3Q model by investigating the role of service quality (SQ), in addition to sy...

Interactive online decision aids often employ user-decision aid dialogues as forms of user-system interaction to help construct and elicit users' attribute preferences about a product type. This study extends prior research on online decision aids by investigating the effects of a decision aid's user-system interaction mode (USIM), which can be eit...

Compared with traditional offline markets, online auctions constrain all sellers to compete within a similar environment in terms of interface, functionality, and market rules. One means for sellers to differentiate themselves is through a set of listing options. One such characteristic that has received little research interest, despite its econom...

Despite extensive deliberations in contemporary literature, the design of citizen-centric e-government websites remains an unresolved theoretical and pragmatic conundrum. Operationalizing e-government service quality to investigate and improve the design of e-government websites has been a much sought-after objective. Yet, there is a lack of action...

Exploiting the social network paradigm in the context of online shopping opens a new world of opportunities to sellers and consumers, and constitutes a new theoretically interesting domain for scholars to investigate. The present paper discusses why to study and how to theorize about online social shopping networks (OSSNs), defined as digital arran...

While numerous prior studies have extended our knowledge of the impact of recommendations and decision-making strategies on e-Consumers' purchase process, few have empirically investigated how e-Consumers integrate diverse recommendations from multiple sources. Relying on cognitive dissonance theory and signaling theory, this study postulated that...

This paper aims to extend our knowledge about employees’ noncompliance with Information Security Policies (ISPs), focusing on employees’ self-justification as a result of escalation of commitment that may trigger noncompliance behaviour. Escalation presents a situation when employees must decide whether to persist or withdraw from nonperforming tas...

Transactive memory is an effective mechanism for locating and coordinating expertise in small groups and has been shown to hold numerous benefits for groups and organizations. To extend transactive memory beyond the scope of small groups, researchers have proposed the use of information technology (IT). This paper provides an integrated discussion...

The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework to analyze obstacles, challenges, and incentives which lead non-professional developers to design websites and produce information that are accessible to people with disabilities, and to describe the development of a reliable and validated instrument designed to test it. Results show that...

In organizations, successful knowledge management is determined by individual workers who engage in two modes of knowledge seeking behaviors: exploitation and exploration. To understand the effectiveness of knowledge behaviors, we define individual exploitation and exploration behaviors in terms of different knowledge outcomes, relevance to tasks a...

This article discusses the role of commonly used neurophysiological tools such as psychophysiological tools (e.g., EKG, eye tracking) and neuroimaging tools (e.g., fMRI, EEG) in Information Systems research. There is heated interest now in the social sciences in capturing presumably objective data directly from the human body, and this interest in...

Over more than a decade, IS research has examined the role of trust in the context of technology adoption such as website acceptance (Gefen et al. 2003), successful online interactions (Coppola et al. 2004) and recommendation agents usage (Wang and Benbasat 2005). The primary antecedent of trust in the line of research is often trustee's trustworth...

This study addresses the question, "How do managerial competencies in client and vendor project managers complement each other in influencing the success of an Information System outsourcing (ISO) project?" We utilized the Social Exchange Theory to theoretically ground this study, keeping in mind the possible contradictions between domain and cross...

In the current knowledge-oriented society, knowledge is a core strategic component for organizations. Successful knowledge management is therefore a key factor in organizational performance. At the same time, some studies have assumed that knowledge management performance is distinguished from the general features of organizational performance. Thu...

This article discusses the role of commonly used neurophysiological tools such as psychophysiological tools (e.g., EKG, eye tracking) and neuroimaging tools (e.g., fMRI, EEG) in Information Systems research. There is heated interest now in the social sciences in capturing presumably objective data directly from the human body, and this interest in...

Prior studies on product recommendation agents (RAs) have been based on the effort-accuracy perspective in which the amount of effort required to make a decision and the accuracy of such decisions are two dominant antecedents of user acceptance of RAs. The current study extends the effort-accuracy perspective by considering trade-off difficulty, a...

Customer loyalty is a key driver of financial performance for online firms. The effect of service quality on customer loyalty has been well established. Yet, there is a paucity of research that has studied the cost of obtaining service quality during the service process and the service outcome influenced by such cost. We extend previous research an...

This paper reports on two studies that investigate the design of online product interactivity. The first study compares three different presentation formats: a video presentation and two Virtual Product Experience (VPE) presentations, namely, triggered interaction and full interaction. The findings suggest that triggered interaction VPE is more eff...

In recent work, researchers have supplemented traditional IS adoption models with new constructs that capture users' relational, social, and emotional beliefs. These beliefs have given rise to questions regarding their antecedents and the nature of the user-artifact relationship. This paper sheds light on these questions by asserting that users per...

With the advent of e-commerce, the potential of new Internet technologies to mislead or deceive consumers has increased considerably. This paper extends prior classifications of deception and presents a typology of product-related deceptive information practices that illustrates the various ways in which online merchants can deceive consumers via e...

This paper explores the knowledge demands of expertise seekers for the purpose of designing effective expertise locator systems. We conduct an empirical investigation, using conjoint analysis and within-subject tests, exploring the relative importance assigned to different experts' attributes under two expertise seeking contexts: knowledge allocati...

Product recommendation agents (PRA) are systems built to facilitate customers' products purchase on e-commerce websites. Prior literature focuses on the shaping effects of PRA to customers' decision making. More challengingly, PRA can be built to change customers' product choice by combining with persuasive features. This paper explores this new ty...

Prior studies investigating business-to-consumer e-commerce have focused predominantly on online shopping by individuals on their own, although consumers often desire to conduct their shopping activities with others. This study explores the important, but seldom studied, topic of collaborative online shopping. It investigates two design components...

The performance of the journal is reviewed, and metrics for 2010 are presented. In addition, key editorial transitions are highlighted.

Perceived risk is an important construct in e-commerce research, but it has not been approached in a manner sufficiently systematic, comprehensive, or detailed to be understood along multiple dimensions instructive for information systems designers. This paper fills the gap by proposing a model of perceived risk based on a well-established marketin...

Mobile product recommendation agents (RAs) are software systems that operate on mobile handheld devices, using wireless Internet to support users' decisions en route, such as consumers' product choices in retail stores. As the demand for ubiquitous access to the web grows, potential benefits of mobile RAs have been recognized, albeit with little su...

Product Recommendation Agents (PRAs) and other web-based decision aids are deployed extensively to provide online shoppers with virtual advising services. While the design of PRA’s functional features has received a high degree of attention in academic studies, the social aspects of human–PRA interactions are comparatively less explored.This paper...

Many organizations recognize that their employees, who are often considered the weakest link in information security, can also be great assets in the effort to reduce risk related to information security. Since employees who comply with the information security rules and regulations of the organization are the key to strengthening information secur...

This research explores how consumers use online decision aids with screening and evaluation support functionalities under varying product attribute-load conditions. Drawing on resource-matching theory, we conducted a 3 × 2 factorial experiment to test the interaction between decision aid features (i.e., low versus high-screening support, and aids w...

Several aspects of trust in new and under-researched Information Systems have been discussed. One of the experts, Dimoka, captured the location, timing and level of brain activity that are associated with trust and distrust when subjects interacted with four experimentally manipulated seller profiles that differed on their level of trust and distru...

The information systems field emerged as a new discipline of artificial science as a result of intellectual efforts to understand the nature and consequences of computer and communication technology in modern organizations. As the rapid development of ...

This study examined the link between clients and vendors' managerial competencies and leadership with Information Systems outsourcing (ISO) project success. At present, ISO is a multi-billion dollar industry, and has spawned a new industry related to contract management. At the micro-level, ISO offers firms economic, strategic, and technical benefi...

This article aims to discuss the use of common neurophysiological tools, such as psychophysiological tools (e.g., EKG, eye tracking) and neuroimaging tools (e.g., fMRI, EEG) in Information Systems (IS) research. There is much interest in the social sciences in capturing objective data directly from the human body, and this interest has also been ga...

With the increasing prevalence of online shopping, many companies have begun to provide "live help" functions on their Web sites to facilitate interactions between online consumers and customer service representatives. However, little is understood as to the effect of live help service contributing to online consumers' perceptions. We investigate t...

We report the results from a study investigating online shoppers' perceptions and evaluations of online social shopping design artifacts. To do so, we use the framework developed by Markus and Silver (2008) for studying information technology artifacts and their effects. Hence, we examine the functional affordances, i.e., the potential uses, and th...

This paper investigates the impact of the characteristics of information security policy (ISP) on an employee's security compliance in the workplace. Two factors were proposed as the antecedents of employees' security compliance: ISP Fairness and ISP Quality. ISP Quality is comprised of three quality dimensions--Clarity, Completeness, and Consisten...