Security in e-commerce and the economics of immediate satisfaction

This paper apply lessons from the investigation on behavioral economics to understand the decision making process with regard to safety in electronic business. This paper shows that it is unreasonable to expect individual rationality in this context. Models of self-decision problems and satisfaction offer more descriptions of the decision process and are more consistent with available data. In particular, this paper shows why who may genuinely want to protect their safety might not do so because of psychological tortuosity well documented in the behavioral literature; we show that these tortuosity may affect not only 'naive' people but also 'sophisticated' ones; and we testify that this may occur also when people become aware of the risks from not protecting their safety as significant.