Paccar Hall, Room 293
Seminar Speaker: Behnaz Ghahestani Bojd (PhD)
Affiliation: University of Washington
Area: Information Systems Name of Presentation: Online Weight-loss Challenges: An Empirical Study on the Effects of Gamification in Online Weight-loss Communities Abstract:
Online weight-loss communities connect individuals with a support network of people who share similar weight-loss goals. Integrating weight-loss goals with gamification elements such as leaderboards, online weight-loss challenges are among the most popular features of these communities. In this paper, using data from a leading online weight-loss community, we study the effect of challenges on weight-loss progress. We utilize a system GMM approach to address endogeneity issues. Our findings indicate that participation in challenges has a positive effect on weight-loss. Further, we show that different goal setting and social comparison mechanisms result in heterogeneous effects across challenges. Our results suggest that challenges with a high number of weight-loss instructions and moderate number of competitors can provide an optimal weight-loss environment. The results of this study can provide implications for healthcare providers to design effective online weight-loss interventions. Further, our findings can serve as guidelines for designing other gamified information systems. |