统计与管理学院2015年学术报告第57期
【主 题】Play and Pay: Social Influence and Monetization in Mobile Social Games
【报告人】方斌
Ph.D. student, 哈尔滨工业大学
【时 间】 2015年12月24日（星期四）09:30－10:30
【地 点】 上海财经大学统计与管理学院大楼1208室
【语 言】 英文
【摘 要】Online social games provide unique opportunities to study individuals’ behaviors and decision making in a closed economy. A fundamental economic problem in social gaming is how to monetize players. We address this problem from the lens of players’ networking behaviors. Specifically, we are interested in how players’ playing and paying behaviors are influenced by their networked peers, the wealth distribution in the economy and the dynamics of the social network they are embedded in. Using a comprehensive social game dataset obtained from Tencent.com, we find that the cohesion effect emanated from players’ friend network is a key driver behind players willingness to pay. Moreover, the cohesion effect differs as the nature of social ties changes. Cohesion of new friends is more influential than that of old friends. High level of wealth dispersion among friends dis-incentivizes players to pay. Multi-relational ties, such as those consisted of the friend and rivalry relationship, exert different impact. Our results show that two friends encountering a common rival tend to assimilate each other’s paying behavior. These findings have direct implications for the gaming company to design a smart game and more broadly, for a virtual economy to understand the microscopic individual behavior.
