Gamified System Effectiveness on Social Trading Platforms

To motivate user engagement and generate desired engagement outcomes, some social trading platforms have introduced gamified systems with hierarchical badges and financial incentives. However, previous studies have not examined the effectiveness of such an application. Based on data collected from a popular social trading platform, eToro, we empirically examine the effectiveness of the gamified system and its mechanism. Results indicate that the gamified system under social trading is effective in inducing user-to-user and user-to-system interactions, thus leading to some desired engagement outcomes on social media. However, the gamified system does not contribute to the engagement outcomes on financial investment. Our paper contributes to the literature on both gamification and social trading, highlighting gamification’s important practical implications for platform managers, cautioning against the possible ineffectiveness of the dual-outcome gamified system and shedding light on the design of gamified systems

Goal Pursuit of Sellers in Hierarchical Online Reputation Systems

To understand sellers’ reputation status more intuitively and quickly, a hierarchical reputation system is routinely deployed by online C2C marketplaces, where reputation scores are divided into several grades shown in badges. It not only helps the consumers but also unintentionally introduces the incentive hierarchies to motivate sellers to pursuit the reputation goals. Yet the existing literature remains largely unclear whether sellers’ goal pursuit behavior exists in the context of electronic commerce. We gathered data from a large online marketplace to answer this question. The results show that sellers will exert more efforts (i.e., take discounts) when their absolute reputation scores are closer to the threshold of next grade. Moreover, low value products and high value products decrease more than median value products. This relationship is moderated by sellers’ relative position in their current grade. Our findings contribute both goal pursuit and online market literature and have direct managerial implications