Market user interface design

Sven Seuken,Kamal Jain,David C Parkes,Mary Czerwinski,Desney Tan,Eric Horvitz

doi:10.1145/2229012.2229080

Sven Seuken, Kamal Jain + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1145/2229012.2229080

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Abstract

Despite the pervasiveness of markets in our lives, little is known about the role of user interfaces (UIs) in promoting good decisions in domains. How does the way we display information to end users, and the set of choices we offer, influence users' decisions? In this paper, we introduce a new research agenda on market user interface design. Our goal is to find the optimal UI, taking into account that users incur cognitive costs and are boundedly rational. Via lab experiments we systematically explore the UI design space, and we study the automatic optimization of UIs given a behavioral (quantal response) model of user behavior. Surprisingly, we find that the behaviorally-optimized UI performs worse than the standard UI, suggesting that the quantal response model did not predict user behavior well. Subsequently, we identify important behavioral factors that are missing from the user model, including loss aversion and position effects, which motivates follow-up studies. Furthermore, we find significant differences between individual users in terms of rationality. This suggests future research on personalized UI designs, with interfaces that are tailored towards each individual user's needs, capabilities, and preferences.

Highlights

Electronic markets are becoming more pervasive but a remaining research challenge is to develop user interfaces (UIs) to promote effective outcomes for users
Traditional economic models assume agents to be perfectly rational, with unlimited time and unbounded computational resources for deliberation. We address this discrepancy by explicitly taking behavioral considerations into account when designing market UIs
A market UI can best be defined via two questions: first, what information is displayed to the user? Second, how many and which choices are offered to the user? Our goal is to develop a computational method that finds the optimal market UI, given a behavioral user model

Summary

Introduction

Electronic markets are becoming more pervasive but a remaining research challenge is to develop user interfaces (UIs) to promote effective outcomes for users. This is important because markets often present users with a very large number of choices, making it difficult for users to find the optimal choice. As we are asked to make market decisions more and more frequently, deliberation gets costly and we cannot spend too much time on individual decisions. This is where Herb Simon’s 40-year old quote still says it best:

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