Essays on Individuals’ Decision-Making and Engagement in Digital Platforms

Abstract

Technology has brought about a lot of business innovations, such as fintech, sharing economy and entertainment analytics, which provides great opportunities of examining these innovations from different perspectives. My dissertation is motivated by the desire to gain a better understanding of the transformational effect of the digital innovations, with a specific focus on the individuals’ decision-making behavior. First, I focus on a mobile gaming platform. To ensure the success of mobile games, game publishers need to keep their players engaged and, at the same time, seek monetization strategies that do not interrupt players’ engagement. Reward ads, a relatively new and increasingly popular in-app advertising monetization model in which players can voluntarily watch an ad in exchange for a reward within the game, can help publishers generate revenue without breaking the flow of the game. In this essay, I investigate how competence-related intrinsic motivation factors including players' feeling of competence (measured by (a) perceived difficulty and (b) perceived achievement), (c) the fluctuation of perceived difficulty, and (d) reward ads (which can enhance players’ intrinsic motivation and interact with players' feeling of competence) affect players' dynamic engagement state evolution. I find that players’ engagement transition is a complex process - as players interact with the mobile game over time and progress through the game, players may be motivated to different intrinsic motivation factors. Therefore, intrinsic motivation factors should be treated as a dynamic process because one factor may be more or less effective as players move to different engagement levels. Second, I study a social trading platform which is a recent innovation in the field of fintech. Social trading is a novel form of investing that allows retail investors to observe the trading behavior of other investors and to communicate through the news feed. Moreover, social trading allow inexperience investors (followers) to automatically follow the trades of experts (leaders) in real time. In this essay, I examine the determinants of the link formation and link dissolution processes, with an emphasis on the social communications among investors. The results show that the determinants of link formation and dissolution are asymmetric, and different types of social communications, such as posts and comments, have different implications for link formation and dissolution. In addition, the results show that financial performance and demographic characteristics are also important determinants of link formation. However, once a link is formed, followers mainly focus on financial performance in addition to social communication but not on demographic characteristics. The findings have important implications for both investors and social trading platforms.