Persuasive Technology

Persuasive system features have been extensively examined, and many of them have been shown to be effective in supporting individuals’ achieving their behavioral goals and enhancing system use. Also, companies and organizations have utilized persuasive features in their implementations successfully. However, in order to obtain competitive advantage, organizations need to not only take using persuasive features as differentiation strategy, but also to think about cost of developing persuasive systems. While the research on evaluating persuasive features is important, we argue that previous research has ignored the cost of building persuasive features. As a first step in remedying this gap in research, we present and discuss four research directions for studying cost of developing persuasive systems. This study contributes to persuasive technology field by paving the way for a new research area with highly practical implications.