DALE · Exploring Consumer Behavior in the Digital Age: Insights from Theory-driven, Large-scale Randomized Field Experiments on Mobile Data Alerts and Data Breach Announcements

Exploring Consumer Behavior in the Digital Age: Insights from Theory-driven, Large-scale Randomized Field Experiments on Mobile Data Alerts and Data Breach Announcements

We live more and more of our lives through digital channels. Two everyday consequences of this shift have been largely under-studied. First, mobile internet has become a near-universal but capped resource: when our monthly data allowance is about to run out, our operator sends us a "near-end" reminder, yet we know surprisingly little about whether — and for whom — these reminders actually work, or at what point in the month they are best sent. Second, the same digital convenience that makes online shopping the default also exposes us to cyberattacks: when a retailer's online store goes down because of a data breach, customers must decide whether to wait, switch channels, or switch providers. Although such incidents are increasingly common and costly, what individual consumers actually do in response remains poorly documented. DALE — Exploring Consumer Behavior in the Digital Age — addresses both gaps. The project combines theory-driven modelling with large-scale, real-world data from two industry partners to deliver evidence-based answers to two questions that matter for consumers, firms, and regulators alike: • MODALE: How effective are reminder-based "nudges" when a digital resource is scarce, and does the timing of the reminder change the answer? • CYDALE: How do consumers actually behave after a corporate cyberattack disrupts the online channel of an omnichannel retailer? The project is hosted at IESE Business School (University of Navarra, Spain) under the supervision of Prof. Víctor Martínez-de-Albéniz, and is funded by the European Commission's Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship programme (Horizon Europe, 2024–2026). The expected pathway to impact is threefold. Scientifically, the project advances the interdisciplinary understanding of consumer behavior at the intersection of operations management, marketing, behavioral economics, and information systems. For firms, it provides directly actionable evidence on how to design alerts and how to manage customer recovery after a cyber-disruption. For policy, it informs European frameworks on digital consumer protection (bill-shock alerts) and cybersecurity (notably the NIS2 Directive and the Cyber Resilience Act framework) by quantifying the consumer-side consequences of these regulations and the events they aim to address.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union