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Introduction
Decision support systems[1] (DSS) is the broad “area of the information systems (IS) discipline focused on supporting and improving managerial decision making” (Arnott and Pervan, 2014, p. 269). As such, the DSS field encompasses a variety of interactive decision aids known by terms such as expert systems, data-driven DSS, management IS, business intelligence and Big Data analytics (Arnott and Pervan, 2014). The several decades of researchon the use of DSS (Power et al., 2011) generally suggest positive outcomes for decision making (Phillips-Wren et al., 2009). However, there is evidence of misuse and abuse of such aids by decision makers (Parasuraman and Riley, 1997; Parasuraman and Manzey, 2010; Park et al., 2015; Stein et al., 2015). Whereas “use” refers to the voluntary engagement with a decision aid with the intent of using its features to support a task (Stein et al., 2015), “misuse” entails either an over-reliance on the aid that typically results in a failure to monitor decision biases (Parasuraman and Riley, 1997), or an underutilization and neglect of the aid, often resulting in the DSS being disused or forgotten (Barki and Huff, 1985). For instance, misuse can result from using a decision aid when its use might not be necessary or from failing to monitor its recommendations against good judgment. Misuse may also occur when decision makers ignore recommendations from the aid (Fildes et al., 2006), overweighting their own judgment in the process(Yaniv, 2004; Krueger, 2003).
Exiguous or improper use of decision aids is of interest for a variety of reasons. At the organizational level, concerns have been raised regarding the return on monetary and human capital investments in the design and development (Kohli and Devraj, 2004) of such systems. When used inadequately, (i.e. misused), decision aids fail to contribute to improved organizational performance (van Dongen and van Maanen, 2013; Park et al., 2015) and can lead to poor decision quality (Grabowski and Sanborn, 2003; Anand et al., 2015). Furthermore, decision makers over-weight their own judgment and discount advice from other sources including that from decision aids (Yaniv, 2004) leading to biased and misguided decisions. Misuse of DSS is also positively related to erroneous decisions (Workman, 2005), costs of which may well offset the benefits...