ESSAYS ON CUSTOMER ANALYTICS IN MOBLIE ECOSYSTEMS

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on understanding the value of customer analytics in the mobile channel through three essays. Specifically, I study customer behaviors and technology use in mobile ecosystems. The first essay of this dissertation examines the difference in the effects of recommendation systems across the PC and mobile channels on customer-level decision outcomes and market. I conduct two randomized field experiments and find that the impact of the recommendation systems is higher for the mobile channel than the PC channel on customer-level decision outcomes. With respect to the market, I observe no direct effect of recommendation systems on sales diversity but I find that diversity of both product sales and views are higher on the mobile channels compared to the PC channel. In the second essay, I study the composite effect of mobile push notifications and recommendation systems on views and sales in the context of mobile retailing. While the direct effect of such notifications on the pushed product is to be expected, I find interestingly that the effect of the notification is significantly higher for recommended products, suggesting a complementarity between push notifications and recommendation systems that has not yet been addressed in the literature. Finally, I broaden the scope of my studies in my third essay by studying a context that which has received little attention within the mobile context – charitable giving and cause marketing. I study how mobile devices may be used to encourage charitable giving through cause marketing campaign by conducting a large-scale randomized field experiment, focusing on the influence of push notifications, monetary subsidies, and intertemporal choices of subsidy in mobile cause marketing context. Results of the experiment demonstrate that push notifications have a remarkably high effect on donation outcomes. Contrary to previous findings from offline contexts, I find that donation decision and donation amount are significantly higher with rebate subsidies, compared to matching subsidies. Taken as a whole, this dissertation contributes to a better understanding of customer behavior and the role of the technology use in the mobile ecosystem.