Sustainable Decisions and Behavior in an Algorithm Driven Economy
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Psychology of Sustainability and Sustainable Development".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2022) | Viewed by 620
Special Issue Editor
Interests: Digital transformation in consumption and at work: human-computer interaction, algorithm-based decision systems, artificial intelligence, explainable artificial intelligence, promotion of sustainable behavior through algorithm-based decision systems; Industrial and organizational psychology in general: personality and leadership, new work, market, and consumer psychology; Sustainable behavior: Determinants of sustainable consumption, sustainability motivation, education for sustainable development, educational research, behavioral economics; Methods: experiments to detect bias in algorithms, social research methods, longitudinal research, survey methods, item-response-theory, online research, evaluation research, structural equation modeling, growth curve modeling
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The transformation of the current economic system into a sustainable one requires decisions in favor of more sustainable options from consumers, politics, and business.
The different elements of the economic system are interdependent in many ways. In particular, the sum of consumers' decisions influences the share of sustainable products in the market, which resources are used, and which environmental impacts result from the economic system. But people can also influence political decisions through political participation and through their decisions at the workplace.
Identifying biases in algorithms and ways to integrate consensus decisions in an organizational context (e.g., human resource management) plays a central role in this special issue. Thus, we welcome research that identifies determinants and their effect sizes that can be used to improve working conditions – especially in terms of New Work.
In parallel to the current efforts to make our society more sustainable, a digital transformation of production and consumption is taking place. In the process, individual decisions are increasingly shifting into a digital algorithm-driven world, such as when integrating algorithms into the human-resource management process, buying products via online stores or using sharing apps. This shift brings opportunities for companies, consumers, and policy makers to influence decisions for or against a more sustainable economy. For example, digital transformation at work can help to increase competitiveness and sustainability of organization, digital sharing platforms can help to save resources, and algorithm-driven shopping portals can help to nudge towards more sustainable consumption.
Overall, algorithm-based decision systems already influence individual decisions and will do so even more in the future. Whether or not algorithms promote the transformation of the economy in the direction of sustainability will be defined by the way these algorithms are implemented. The way algorithms are coded and trained (and potentially biased) and how we can understand their decisions (explainable artificial intelligence) are important issues in this context.
Thus, we seek original papers that research the following topics:
- How algorithm driven digital transformation can help to improve human resource management
- How are consumer decisions influenced by algorithm-based decisions systems (e.g., on shopping platforms and/or in social networks)?
- How can these decision systems be used to change consumption patterns?
- How can employees that design, implement, and maintain these algorithms actively influence/or bias their outcomes?
- In which ways can civil society have a say in the design of these algorithms?
Dr. Siegmar Otto
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- digital transformation
- digital human resource management
- digital leadership
- sustainable consumption
- sustainable knowledge, motivation and behavior
- commons dilemma
- decision making
- human-machine-interaction
- technology and risk acceptance
- digital media
- artificial intelligence
