An Experimental Study of Cryptocurrency Market Dynamics

As cryptocurrencies gain popularity and credibility, marketplaces for cryptocurrencies are growing in importance. Understanding the dynamics of these markets can help to assess how viable the cryptocurrnency ecosystem is and how design choices affect market behavior. One existential threat to cryptocurrencies is dramatic fluctuations in traders' willingness to buy or sell. Using a novel experimental methodology, we conducted an online experiment to study how susceptible traders in these markets are to peer influence from trading behavior. We created bots that executed over one hundred thousand trades costing less than a penny each in 217 cryptocurrencies over the course of six months. We find that individual "buy" actions led to short-term increases in subsequent buy-side activity hundreds of times the size of our interventions. From a design perspective, we note that the design choices of the exchange we study may have promoted this and other peer influence effects, which highlights the potential social and economic impact of HCI in the design of digital institutions.Comment: CHI 201

Impulse Buying: Designing for Self-Control with E-commerce

Impulse buying is a common but potentially problematic behavior that can leave consumers with financial hardship and feelings of regret. The goal of this dissertation is to understand how to support consumers who wish to gain greater control of their online impulse buying. This research first investigates how current e-commerce stores encourage impulsive spending by conducting a content analysis of 200 top-earning shopping websites (Study 1). We demonstrate that the use of impulse-driving features is common and we catalog the different types of features that are commonly used. Second, we take a user-centered approach by directly asking consumers what type of support they would like in tackling online impulse buying (Study 2). A survey of 151 frequent online impulse buyers reveals that consumers want tools that, for example, make costs more salient, encourage reflection, enforce spending limits, increase checkout effort, and postpone purchases. Consumers were not interested in social accountability tools or tools utilizing regret or guilt. Relying on these insights, we designed and tested postponement, reflection, and distraction interventions to encourage self-control with e-commerce (Studies 3-5). Through an online experiment, we show that a 25-hour delay is effective at lowering consumer’s felt urge to buy impulsively and also at lowering purchase intent (Study 3). Conversely, an in-lab experiment testing a 10-minute delay on Amazon purchases failed to show a statistically significant decline in the number of impulse products purchased or dollars spent impulsively (Study 4). We highlight that 100% of participants continued to shop during their 10-minute delay to help explain the lack of an effect. Finally, through an online experiment, we show that prompting consumers to spend approximately 3 ½ minutes listing reasons for and against buying a product or engaging in a distracting task reduces the felt urge to buy impulsively and purchase intent. We conclude by asserting that postponement is an effective self-control strategy if (a) the delay is long enough to allow for the natural distractions of life to cool the impulse to buy or (b) is short but focused on either reflecting on the product or focused on something distracting, but not focused on browsing for additional impulse purchases. Taken together, this dissertation takes a consumer advocacy perspective by shedding light on potentially problematic design practices, by identifying opportunities for corporations to engage in more transparent design, and by providing design recommendations for technologies that help consumers achieve greater self-control with e-commerce.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155212/1/moserc_1.pd