Digital Interventions for Healthy and Sustainable Consumer Behavior

Our research in this area investigates how digital environments —through thoughtfully designed choice architectures— can help individuals align their everyday decisions with their long-term goals and preferences.

Although many people aspire to live healthier and more environmentally conscious lives, they often struggle to follow through due to cognitive overload, limited self-control, social pressures, or the influence of persuasive marketing, for instance. Digital environments — including apps, websites, and online platforms — enable real-time interactions that support consumers in acting on their aspirations.

Drawing on theories from psychology, behavioral economics, behavioral public policy, and information systems, we design and embed behavioral interventions into digital environments. We rigorously evaluate the impact of these interventions on decision-making in various real-life contexts – such as online grocery stores – using laboratory, online and field experiments. By bridging behavioral research with digital technologies, our work aims to create practical, evidence-based solutions to pressing societal challenges.

Current projects

  • Overcoming cognitive biases in travel planning
  • Behavioral interventions in online shopping for healthier and more sustainable consumer decisions
  • Data Donations and digital nudges for sustainable behavior change
  • SHOPHERO: Leveraging loyalty card data to reduce the impact of consumer food choices
  • Apps on track: Digital influence on public transport use among the elderly

Completed projects

  • E-commerce widget for nutrition and sustainability
  • Accuracy of food choice self-reports
  • Promoting healthier food product choices with salience, transparency, and self-nudging
  • Pro-self, pro-social, or pro-profit? Framing effects in digital nutrition nudges
  • Effectiveness and ethics of digital salience nudges for healthier food choices
  • Digital choice architecture and electronic word-of-mouth
  • Complementarities in behavioral interventions
  • Goal setting and financial incentives for energy conservation

  • Manzke, L., O’Sullivan, K., & Tiefenbeck, V. (2025). “Did I buy that just now?”–Investigating factors influencing the accuracy of food choice self-reports in a simulated online grocery store. Appetite
  • Kuhlemann, S., Mehta, P., & Tiefenbeck, V. (2024). Greener or Faster: Unraveling the Impact of Travel Time Presentation on Rail vs. Air Travel Decision-Making. International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2024). – Best paper nominee.
  • Fang, X., Goette, L., Rockenbach, B., Sutter, M., Tiefenbeck, V., Schoeb, S., Staake, T. (2023), Complementarities in behavioral interventions: Evidence from a field experiment on resource conservation. Journal of Public Economics 228 (2023): 105028.
  • Michels, L., Schmitt, K., Ochmann, J., Laumer, S., Tiefenbeck, V.  (2023), Salience, transparency, and self-nudging: A digital nudge to promote healthier food product choices. European Journal of Information Systems.
  • Fuchs, K. L., Lian, J., Michels, L., Mayer, S., Toniato, E., & Tiefenbeck, V. (2022). Effects of Digital Food Labels on Healthy Food Choices in Online Grocery Shopping. Nutrients, 14(10), 2044.
  • Günther, S., Staake, T., Schöb, S., Tiefenbeck, V. (2020). The behavioral response to a corporate carbon offset program: A field experiment on adverse effects and mitigation strategies. Global Environmental Change 64, 102123,doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102123.
  • Tiefenbeck, V., Wörner, A., Schöb, S., Fleisch, E., Staake, T. (2019), Real-time feedback promotes energy conservation in the absence of volunteer selection bias and monetary incentives. Nature Energy 4(1), 35-41.