Abstract

Increasing user participation or changing behavior are key goals when applying gamification. Existing studies in domains such as education, health, and enterprise show that gamification can have a positive impact on meeting these goals. However, there is still a lack of detailed insights into how certain game design elements affect user behavior and motivation. To gain further insight, this paper presents a user study in the field with 20,000 participants of a mobile e-commerce application over a one-month time period to analyze the impact of gamification in the e-commerce domain and to compare the effectiveness of tangible versus intangible rewards. Results show that gamification has a positive impact in the e-commerce domain. The study also reveals that tangible rewards increase the user activity substantially more than intangible rewards. We further show how tangible rewards affect certain user types and provide a first discussion on the lastingness of these rewards.

@inproceedings{Meder:2018:GET:3275116.3275126,
 author = {Meder, Michael and Plumbaum, Till and Raczkowski, Aleksander and Jain, Brijnesh and Albayrak, Sahin},
 title = {Gamification in E-Commerce: Tangible vs. Intangible Rewards},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 22Nd International Academic Mindtrek Conference},
 series = {Mindtrek '18},
 year = {2018},
 isbn = {978-1-4503-6589-5},
 location = {Tampere, Finland},
 pages = {11--19},
 numpages = {9},
 url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3275116.3275126},
 doi = {10.1145/3275116.3275126},
 acmid = {3275126},
 publisher = {ACM},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 keywords = {E-Commerce, Gamification, Intangible Rewards, Tangible Rewards, User Behavior Analysis},
}