嘉 宾：邓皓文 PhD. Candidate 复旦大学
主持人：刘佳璐 助理教授 上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院
时 间：2024年11月25日（周一）9:30-11:00
地 点：上海交通大学徐汇校区安泰楼A305

内容简介:
Online gaming platforms are increasingly offering users the option to play for free. However, the in-game purchases these users make often do not align with their high level of engagement in free gameplay. This research applies and expands the agency and communion theory to uncover two primary motives that distinctly influence users‘ engagement vs. purchase decisions. Specifically, we hypothesize that agentic orientation, focusing on self-accomplishment and independence, primarily enhances engagement. In contrast, communal orientation, emphasizing connection and interdependence, encourages purchase more. Using massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) as canonical examples, we conducted three studies to test these hypotheses. Study 1 combined sequential rule mining and hierarchical Bayesian modeling to identify each consumer‘s agentic or communal orientation from a large gaming dataset, and correlated it with the user‘s engagement and purchase. Studies 2 and 3 presented two controlled experiments to investigate potential mechanisms and practical implications. These studies consistently reveal that users‘ agentic orientation drives engagement more, whereas communal orientation motivates purchase more. We further expand the boundaries of the theory, revealing that communal orientation becomes more salient in multiplayer context, yet it decreases users‘ purchase of functional items. Conversely, agentic orientation remains unaffected by the gameplay context but leads to an increase in users‘ purchases of functional items. The findings also shed strategic light on measurement and activation of suited orientation to enhance freemium profitability, particularly as even less-engaged users may contribute significant revenues to platforms.

演讲人简介：
Deng is a Ph.D. candidate of information management at Fudan University. His research centers on virtual communities and big data analytics, with publications in journals such as Information Systems Research and management world. He won the best conference paper award at CNAIS in 2022, Student Scholarship at INFORMS Data Science Workshop in 2022. He also contributes as an anonymous reviewer for Information Systems Research.

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