Two Essays on User Behavior Across Digital Platforms
2024-05
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Two Essays on User Behavior Across Digital Platforms
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2024-05
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Unlike traditional business models, platforms enable direct interactions between agents. In the digital economy era, platforms have become more extensive and drive an explosion in content creation, distribution, and interaction. Platform managers aim to enhance user experience, boost engagement, and optimize revenue. However, the interactions between individuals and the platform, as well as among users themselves, raise significant issues such as fairness and consumer welfare, which policymakers need to address. For both platform developers and policymakers, it’s important to understand how users are interacting with each other and with the platform's interfaces and policies. This dissertation examines user behaviors across various digital platforms to derive insights that can guide platform designs. This overarching theme is organized into two interrelated parts: The first stream focuses on the examination of content consumption on digital media platforms. In Essay I, I study user engagement dynamics with two specific interfaces: the “content discovery page," where users browse and select content, and the “consumption page," which allows for consecutive consumption without the need for exploration. Using individual level data from a digital video platform in China, I develop an empirical model framework capturing the dynamic decision-making processes in content discovering and viewing and allowing for individual heterogeneity. The findings show that content variety has differential impacts on user behavior across two interfaces. In addition, I identify distinct user types with varying behavioral patterns and characteristics, offering insights that could inform algorithm designs for better targeting on digital platforms. In Essay II, I explored how policy design impacts participants' behavior on digital platforms, focusing on the evaluation mechanism in the context of crowdsourcing platforms. In this essay, I study a policy design approach, “strategic opacity”, i.e., the intentional obfuscation of evaluation criteria. I employed filed experiments on a real-world crowdsourcing platform. Our findings indicate that strategic opacity can reduce gaming to the system without reducing participation, thereby enhancing platform integrity. Overall, my research contributes to a deeper understanding of user behaviors on digital platforms, providing valuable insights for enhancing platform strategy and user experience. As digital platforms continue to evolve, this work will have substantial relevance and impact in guiding their development.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2024. Major: Business Administration. Advisors: Linli Xu, George John. 1 computer file (PDF); x, 71 pages.
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Xie, Qi. (2024). Two Essays on User Behavior Across Digital Platforms. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/264376.
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