Push-notifications are a design tool used by mobile and web apps to alert subscribers to new information. In recent years, due to widespread adoption of the technology and the shrinking level of user attention available, marketing techniques have been deployed to persuade subscribers to engage positively with notifications. One such technique, known as the curiosity gap, exploits Lowenstein's Information-Gap theory. This paper explores the impact of enticing notification text, instilled by the curiosity gap, on subsequent engagement actions. A classifier was defined to identify enticing language in notifications. Features commonly paired with enticing text were identified. Intelligent notification delivery agents, trained using data captured in-the-wild, were evaluated using enticing and non-enticing notifications to demonstrate the influence of enticing text. Additionally, a solution was proposed and briefly evaluated for limiting subscriber susceptibility to enticing notifications. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Smartphones; • Computing methodologies → Natural language processing; Reinforcement learning.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.