Clocking in or Not? Optimal Design of a Novel Gamified Business Model in Online Learning
研究了在线学习平台如何最优设置打卡返现模式中的时间窗口，发现延长窗口会同时增加心理负效用和降低努力成本，平台应根据用户口碑和内容成本调整窗口长度。
Clocking-in cash-back (CIC), an emerging gamified business model in online learning, has recently garnered significant attention. CIC allows users to secure a full refund of the course fee through consecutive completion of specific tasks within a required time window. These tasks, known as clocking in, encompass activities such as daily assignments and sharing progress updates on social media. By employing this gamification system, the firm effectively monitors user efforts, categorizing them as winners or quitters based on clocking-in completion. In this paper, we examine how a firm should set the optimal time window for its course and how the time window is affected by context-specific factors. We identify two opposing effects associated with extending the time window on users’ quitting time: the psychological disutility increasing effect (negative) and the effort cost decreasing effect (positive). Our results indicate that, as quitters’ positive word-of-mouth effects increase, there are cases in which the firm should opt for shortening the time window. Additionally, we find that, as the marginal content creation cost rises, the firm may find it more advantageous to raise the difficulty level by shortening the time window. Our findings provide valuable insights that online learning firms can utilize to enhance their design of the CIC mechanism.