Behavioral research using the WWW

Behavioral research using the WWW is important for various reasons. The behavior of web users is an important subject in itself. Many application areas are changing fast and profoundly, including information provision and consumption, administrative processes, consumer behavior, entertainment, and social communication. These domains are becoming important subjects of social and economic research aiming at the scientific understanding of the ongoing developments. The design and development of new web applications, both in terms of the technical and business aspects, are complemented by applied research and engineering on the user requirements, HCI, and economic behavior in web applications. The web also offers gains in efficiency in the collection of data on human behavior. The number of sound experimental approaches which were developed and tested so far is rather limited, but some have shown that suitable experimental paradigms can be transferred from the lab to web applications. Nicklisch & Salz (2008) transferred a microeconomic experiment usuall