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Authors:
(1) Muhammad Zia Hydari, Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh and Corresponding author;
(2) Idris Adjerid, Pamplin College of Business;
(3) AAaron D. Striegel, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame.
2. Background and 2.1. Leaderboards
3. Effect of Leaderboards on Healthful Physical Activity and 3.1. Competition
3.3. Moderating Effects of Prior Activity Levels and Leaderboard Size
4. Data and Model
5. Estimation and Robustness of the Main Effects of Leaderboards
5.2. Robustness Check for Leaderboard Initiation
5.4. Fitbit Attrition, Leaderboard De-Adoption, and Additional Robustness Checks
6. Heterogeneous Effect of Leaderboards
6.1. Heterogeneity by Prior Activity Levels
6.2. Interaction of Leaderboard Size, Rank, and Prior Activity Levels
6.3. Summary of Findings from Heterogeneous Effect Analysis
7. Conclusions and Discussion, Endnotes, and References
Ex ante, we theorized that competition and social influence are key mechanisms underlying leaderboard effects but that these mechanisms may introduce both motivational and de-motivational effects of leaderboards. The heterogeneous effects we identify in this section point to the importance of these mechanisms as well as the potential for nuance in their effects. First, we find robust positive impacts of ranking first on a leaderboard, suggesting that successfully competing on leaderboards improves motivation for most users. Interestingly, and contrary to our theoretical conjecture, the benefits of competition hold even for sedentary users: they accrue positive effects from ranking first and are not harmed from leaderboards when they do not rank first.
We attribute the robust benefit of leaderboards for sedentary users to the positive impacts of leaderboards on their exercise reference points and the likelihood of being held accountable by other users (i.e., social influence). However, our results also suggest that social influence enabled by leaderboards can have negative impacts on motivation for some users (e.g., negative impacts on exercise reference points for highly active users). Interestingly, these harms for highly active individuals are attenuated when leaderboards are highly competitive. The nuanced impact of social influence is further demonstrated by the impacts of leaderboard size on physical activity. While larger leaderboards generally increase physical activity, sedentary users see diminishing value from larger leaderboards. This result is in line with our conjecture that social influence effects may diminish for sedentary users if they get “lost in the crowd” of larger leaderboards. In contrast, highly active individuals thrive in large leaderboards, substantiating our conjecture that highly active individuals become more likely to show positive impacts of competition and social influence as leaderboard size increases.
This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.