Presentations at the ICIS 2025 in Nashville

This year's International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) took place in Nashville, USA, from December 14 to 17, 2025. ICIS is the leading international conference in the field of Business Information Systems and brings together thousands of researchers from all over the world every year to present their latest findings and exchange information on current developments in IS research and practice.

This year, the faculty was represented with paper presentations at ICIS not only by researchers from Business Information Systems but also from Business Administration. Sonja Olbing (Chair of Business Administration, esp. Organization and Management), together with Dr. Matthias Sinnemann (University of Münster) presented the study "Digital nomads: A self-determination perspective". The study examines digital nomadism as a form of extreme use of information systems. Based on more than 75,000 posts from the subreddit r/digitalnomad, the study uses topic modeling, sentiment analysis and time series analysis to identify central themes and emotions that characterize the lifestyle of digital nomads. With reference to self-determination theory, the research provides new insights into the role of autonomy, competence and social integration in the everyday working and living lives of digital nomads and thus offers valuable implications for science and practice.

Theres Rüger and Janek Müksch (Chair of Business Administration, esp. Marketing) presented the study "More Than a Mascot? The Effect of Conversational Mascots on Donations for Nonprofit Organizations". The study examines whether and how conversational agents such as chatbots can contribute to an internet user donating to charitable organizations on a website. The empirical study is based on an online experiment in which 156 respondents were each presented with one of three possible treatments (machine-like chatbot, human-like chatbot and branded chatbot). The results show that a brand-like chatbot increases trust in the non-profit organization and promotes donation behavior and could therefore be a suitable tool for NGOs to increase donation behavior.