ABSTRACT: Traders and investors are aware that emotional processes can have material consequences on their financial decision performance. However, typical learning approaches for debiasing fail to overcome emotionally driven financial dispositions, mostly because of subjects' limited capacity for self-monitoring. Our research aims at improving decision makers' performance by (1) boosting their awareness to their emotional state and (2) improving their skills for effective emotion regulation. To that end, we designed and implemented a serious game-based NeuroIS tool that continuously displays the player's individual emotional state, via biofeedback, and adapts the difficulty of the decision environment to this emotional state. The design artifact was then evaluated in two laboratory experiments. Taken together, our study demonstrates how information systems design science research can contribute to improving financial decision making by integrating physiological data into information technology artifacts. Moreover, we provide specific design guidelines for how biofeedback can be integrated into information systems.
Key words and phrases: biofeedback, design science, decision-making processes, emotion regulation, financial decision making, IT artifacts, NeuroIS, serious games