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Decision Support for Global Enterprises pp 177–191Cite as

Individual’s Response to Security Messages: A Decision-Making Perspective

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Part of the book series: Annals of Information Systems ((AOIS,volume 2))

Abstract

Individual decision making determines critical outcomes for organizations in various domains including information security, where the increase of security incidents is causing great concern to organizations. Information security awareness programs are an important approach towards educating users to prevent such incidents. However, it is unclear how to effectively design security programs and messages such that they can inform and change user behavior. This paper attempts to investigate this problem by studying the effects of security message characteristics on users, using the decision-making theory of elaboration likelihood. A 2×2 factorial design experiment was conducted to determine the influence of message repetition and message comprehensibility on user’s elaboration likelihood towards a security message. Our findings indicate that message repetition enhances elaboration likelihood of users. Message comprehensibility interacts with message repetition in determining elaboration likelihood. The results have implications for designing effective security messages and for decision support systems for this purpose.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 3 Science Drive 2, Singapore, 117543

    Tang Qing, Boon-Yuen Ng & Atreyi Kankanhalli

Authors
  1. Tang Qing
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  2. Boon-Yuen Ng
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  3. Atreyi Kankanhalli
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Uday Kulkarni

  2. University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa, USA

    Daniel J. Power

  3. Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA

    Ramesh Sharda

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© 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Qing, T., Ng, BY., Kankanhalli, A. (2007). Individual’s Response to Security Messages: A Decision-Making Perspective. In: Kulkarni, U., Power, D.J., Sharda, R. (eds) Decision Support for Global Enterprises. Annals of Information Systems, vol 2. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-48137-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-48137-1_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-387-48136-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-387-48137-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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