Contribute to MY IT Service: Encouraging Technology Extra-Role Behaviors in User-Artifact Interactions from a Psychological Ownership Perspective

“Contribute to MY IT Service: Encouraging Technology Extra-Role Behaviors in User-Artifact Interactions from a Psychological Ownership Perspective” This research aims to investigate how interactions with IT artifacts can sustain users’ continuance usage of, and encourage their voluntary contributions to, access-based and algorithm-empowered IT services (e.g., Spotify and Duolingo). This question is particularly important because in such contexts, users often have limited interactions with other human users—traditionally the main driver of the target behaviors in virtual communities. In the results, we found that users are more willing to use the technology and perform extra-role behaviors that benefit the technology when they develop a user-artifact relationship, after controlling the alternative mechanisms. We further explain how customization and personalization features facilitate users’ development of such a relationship by co-constructing an extended self with the IT artifact. For practitioners, our study mobilizes the user resources and promotes user voluntary contributions that benefit the technology (e.g., knowledge contribution, user feedback, new user referral, and voluntary payment). By incorporating the algorithm into self-concept as an extended self, we propose a new way of human-algorithm interaction, and hence are able to advise on algorithm appreciation and AI adoption in the non-competitive consumer technology context and provide guidelines and use cases on IT design regarding customization and personalization.