Harnessing the Power of Defaults Now and Forever? The Effects of Mood and Personality

ABSTRACT

Opt-in, opt-out, and forced choice are the three policies most frequently used to engage consumers’ willingness to receive e-mail communication. This research examines the effectiveness and the persistence of these policies in engaging consumer consent to receive e-mail communication, while the effects of consumer mood and personality traits are embedded in the research framework. Three experiments served as the vehicle for data collection. Interaction effects between the default policies and consumer mood and personality traits are examined using logit and multiple regression models. Results show that opt-out is more effective than opt-in and forced choice in engaging consumer consent to receive e-mail communication. Interestingly, opt-in is the most effective policy in engaging a more permanent consumer consent. Although negative mood results in a higher consumer consent rate for e-mail notifications, positive mood results in a higher consent rate for future engagement. Higher levels of neuroticism lead to higher willingness to receive e-mail notifications, but higher extraversion leads to higher future engagement. The article contributes to the literature on defaults, mood, and personality traits. The findings advance the theory and have important managerial implications.

KEY WORDS AND PHRASES:

• online defaults
• online opt-in
• online opt-out
• forced choice
• e-mail marketing
• mood
• personality traits
• carryover effects

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Aristeidis Theotokis for his valuable suggestions on earlier versions of the article. The authors thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their fruitful comments.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2022.2123646.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The online labor platform’s language is English and includes a clear presentation of the crowdsourcing services being provided.

² Simultaneity happens when at least two variables on either side of a model equation influence each other at the same time.

³ Sixty-nine percent of the permanent responses consist of 25.20 percent opt-in, 23.26 percent forced choice, and 20.54 percent opt-out.

⁴ Workers had an average completion time of 6.1 minutes (SD 1.58) for Study 1, 8.2 minutes (SD 1.88) for Study 2, and 9.1 minutes (SD 2.03) for Study 3.

⁵ Workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk should be paid at least the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25/hour (i.e., approximately $0.12/minute) at the time of writing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emmanouela Manganari

Emmanouela Manganari ([email protected]; corresponding author) is an Assistant Professor at the American College of Greece. She holds a Ph.D. from Athens University of Economics and Business. Her research interests are in the areas of default policies, tourism marketing, and sustainability. Dr. Manganari’s work has appeared in such journals as Journal of Business Ethics, Tourism Management, and European Journal of Marketing.

Evangelos Mourelatos

Evangelos Mourelatos ([email protected]) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economics, Accounting, and Finance of Oulu Business School, University of Oulu, Finland. His research interests are in the fields of online labor markets, crowdsourcing, and experimental and behavioral economics. Dr. Mourelatos’s work has appeared in such journals as Behavior and Information Technology, Netnomics, Southern East Journal of Economics, Current Psychology, Interacting with Computers, and others.

Nikos Michos

Nikos Michos ([email protected]) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Business Administration at the University of Patras, Greece. His Ph.D. work examines the evaluation systems of online adult education methods. His general research interests are in the field of flipped classrooms, online education, and digital marketing. He works on experiments for adult e-learning, digital marketing strategies, and consumer behavior.

Efthalia Dimara

Efthalia Dimara ([email protected]) is a professor of statistics and data analysis in the Department of Economics of the University of Patras, Greece. Her research is related to the application of econometric and data analysis techniques in delineating complex decision-making processes of consumers and producers. Dr. Dimara’s empirical work addresses in particular the effects of place images and place identities on consumers’ spending behavior and the adoption of innovation and technology. She has coordinated and participated in a large number of European Union-funded programs for the sustainable development of tourism.