Impact of Gamification on Consumers’ Online Impulse Purchase: The Mediating Effect of Affect Reaction and Social Interaction

Drawing upon the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R)framework, this study developeda theoretical model to examine the impact mechanismof two gamification features on individuals’ impulse purchase in the context of Double Eleven. An empirical survey was conducted and 716 valid questionnaires were collected from consumers using Taobao and Tmall platforms in China.Structural equation modelling method was used to examine the research model. The empirical results suggestedthat rewards giving and badges upgradinggamification features werepositivelyassociated with perceived enjoyment and social interaction reactions, which in turn hadstrong influenceson consumers’ impulse purchase. This study providesnew insights in understandingonline impulsive buyingbehaviorsby incorporatingthe mechanism of gamificationin the new research context of Double Eleven

Social Identity and Inequality--The Impact of China’s Hukou System

We conduct an experimental study to investigate the causal impact of social identity on individuals? response to economic incentives. We focus on China?s decades old household registration system, or the hukou institution, which categorizes citizens into urban and rural residents, and favors the former over the latter in resource allocation. Our results indicate that making individuals? hukou status salient and public significantly reduces the performance of rural migrant students on an incentivized cognitive task by 10 percent. This leads to a leftward shift of their earnings distribution – the proportion of rural migrants below the 25th earnings percentile increases significantly by almost 19 percentage points. However, among non-migrants the proportion with earnings below the 25th percentile drops by 5 percentage points, and the proportion above the 75th percentile increases by almost 8 percentage points, albeit insignificantly. The results demonstrate the impact of institutionally imposed social identity on individuals? intrinsic response to incentives, and consequently on widening income inequality.social identity, hukou, inequality, field experiment, China

Incentive systems and control in a gamified era

Incentives and control systems are one of the most important research areas for management accounting. Mobilising classic psychological theories, this thesis sheds light on the possibility and potential of gamification as an approach to designing incentives and control systems. On the one hand, this thesis raises the attention of management accounting scholars to further explore the motivational effects of gamification. On the other hand, it also sparks designers of gamification in organisations to consider their current use of gamification to incentivise their employees or users. In the first chapter, a netnographic study is conducted in an online on-demand delivery platform to explain how the gamified incentive system motivates delivery riders to perform and how the gamified incentive system helps create a sense of community among riders, as an incentive factor, to further motivate and retain riders on this platform. In the second chapter, in the same field setting, a survey study is conducted to examine the moderation effect of social comparison orientation and the mediation effect of occupational self-efficacy from the relative performance information in riders’ gamified leaderboards. In the third chapter, another netnographic study is conducted in an online learning platform to explain how the platform uses gamification to change users’ behaviour through the internalisation of external gamified elements and how these internalisations further complement the intrinsic motivation to satisfy the users’ three basic psychological needs autonomy, competence, and relatedness

The Dynamics of the Institutional Change and the Market Economy: An Austrian Analysis

The aim of this contribution is to exhibit the operational nature of the Austrian analyses of institutions, particularly those of Lachmann (1994; 1986; 1978; 1977; 1976; 1970). The first section briefly discuss the main features of the Austrian analysis of the market process with the aim of highlighting the necessary irruption of the institutional component. The second section aims at exhibiting the particularities of the Lachmannian analysis of institutional change. The third section proposes to make use of the Lachmannian analytical framework in order to interpret the contemporary transformations of the market economies. I particularly show the great benefit of such a framework in order to, on one side, offer some explanations of the recent financial crisis faced by the emerging economies, and on the other side, to understand the specificity as well as the coherence of the Chinese economic transition., Lachmann, Market economies, Market Process, Institutional change

Roger Caillois, Games of Chance and the Superstar

Superstars are not by accident a conspicuous phenomenon in our culture, but inherently belong to a meritocratic society with mass media, free enterprise, and competition. To make this contention plausible I will use Caillois’s book, Man, Play and Games, to compare the mechanisms underlying the superstar phenomenon with a special kind of game, as set out by Caillois. As far as I know, Caillois’s book is not quoted in the literature dealing with income distribution theories, although the comparison with play and games is, for limited purposes, interesting. In play and games we find almost all elements which play a role in theories of just income distribution: equality of opportunity, chance, talent, competition and skill, reward, entitlement, winners and losers, etc. These are not chance similarities, for “. . . games are largely dependent upon the cultures in which they are practised. They affect their preferences, prolong their customs, and reflect their beliefs . . . One can posit a truly reciprocal relationship between a society and the games it likes to play”. Moreover, as we will see, superstars combine the four basic characteristics of play that make their activities a special kind of play.Caillois superstars Rawls

What\u27s Wrong With American Secondary Schools: Can State and Federal Governments Fix it?

[Excerpt] The poor performance of American students is sometimes blamed on the nation\u27s diversity . Many affluent parents apparently believe that their children are doing acceptably by international standards. This is not the case. In Stevenson, Lee and Stigler\u27s (1986) study of 5th grade math achievement, the best of the 20 classrooms sampled in Minneapolis was outstripped by every single classroom studied in Sendai, Japan and by 19 of the 20 classrooms studied in Taipeh, Taiwan. The nation\u27s top high school students rank far behind much less elite samples of students in other countries. In mathematics the gap between Japanese and Finnish high school seniors and their white American counterparts is about twice the size of the two to three grade level equivalent gap between blacks and whites in the US (NAEP 1988b; IAEEA 1987). The learning deficit is pervasive