Consumer Selection and Use of Software - Empirical Studies on Non-Rational Decision Making

While desktop computers and notebooks have long been part of many households, the wide spread use of smartphones and other mobile devices has made web services, apps and games daily companions in the private lives of many consumers. This development has led to a commercially attractive market for software vendors but also quickly intensified the competition in this industry. Vendors, who want to succeed in this competitive environment need to understand how consumers select software among the multitude of competing offerings and how to maintain the loyalty of existing customers.Despite this need for managerial guidance, the Information Systems Research discipline has so far primarily investigated corporate decisions in the selection and use of software. As a consequence, managerial implications for vendors who develop consumer software are still comparatively sparse. A mere adaptation of insights from research on the corporate environment to the consumer context would, however, be inappropriate. Decision making processes in organizations are often well structured to achieve objectivity and economic rationality. Consumers, on the other hand, often lack this rigor in decision making and may be subject to cognitive bias.In five complementary studies, this book seeks to address this gap. By exploring consumers' non-rational decision making in the selection and use of software, it provides vendors with implications for the design, marketing and management of consumer software along the product lifecycle.