Start Date
10-12-2017 12:00 AM
Description
The decline in user engagement has become a common concern for online communities. Gamified design elements that represent goals have been widely utilized by online platforms to stimulate and retain users. Despite their popularity, empirical evidence indicated that the motivating effects of gamified incentive schemes are transient and only work before attaining goals. We attempt to understand how to optimally design gamified incentive hierarchies in engaging users by appropriately choosing the ranking dispersion. We propose a time varying Markov-modulated regime-switching model to capture the impact of incentive hierarchies and past performance on users’ performance in online fitness communities. Preliminary results suggest that the high-performing state of a user tends to occur around a goal and to be retained till the next goal when it is not too far away. Our findings can contribute to the goal-setting and gamification literature and provide significant guidelines on the design of status-based goals.
Recommended Citation
Yang, Yang; Yang, Yufei; and Teo, Hock Hai, "Optimal Design of Gamified Incentive Hierarchies in Online Fitness Communities" (2017). ICIS 2017 Proceedings. 36.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2017/HumanBehavior/Presentations/36
Optimal Design of Gamified Incentive Hierarchies in Online Fitness Communities
The decline in user engagement has become a common concern for online communities. Gamified design elements that represent goals have been widely utilized by online platforms to stimulate and retain users. Despite their popularity, empirical evidence indicated that the motivating effects of gamified incentive schemes are transient and only work before attaining goals. We attempt to understand how to optimally design gamified incentive hierarchies in engaging users by appropriately choosing the ranking dispersion. We propose a time varying Markov-modulated regime-switching model to capture the impact of incentive hierarchies and past performance on users’ performance in online fitness communities. Preliminary results suggest that the high-performing state of a user tends to occur around a goal and to be retained till the next goal when it is not too far away. Our findings can contribute to the goal-setting and gamification literature and provide significant guidelines on the design of status-based goals.