Web personalization and its effects on users' information processing and decision making

One of the most challenging uses of new technologies in Management Information Systems (MIS) is web personalization. Companies worldwide are using the web to offer customized services and unique web experiences. While there is a wide array of technologies for delivering personalized services over the web, little is known about the effects of web personalization on users' information-processing and decision-making. The objective of this research is to examine the impact of web personalization on the behavior of web users. It is composed of three studies. Study 1 develops a theoretical model of web personalization. We adopt the Bin Model by Wyer and Srull (1989) from social cognition and develop a model of information-processing for a personalized environment. We generate hypotheses from our model and report results of a lab experiment and a field study designed to empirically test the hypotheses. Study 2 employs Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) to examine how content personalization and layout personalization bias users' information-processing (i.e., attention, elaboration, and choice). We also study whether users with different personality traits react differently towards personalized recommendations. Study 3 focuses on the effectiveness of web personalization to persuade a user to abandon an initial choice and accept a personalized choice after the user has already viewed and/or chosen a non-personalized choice. Overall, the current work represents a pioneering effort to bridge the gap between the proliferation of web personalization and the lack of theoretical and empirical work in the area