题　目：Competitive Gamification in Digital Consumption: Evidence from TikTok

嘉　宾：Zirou Chen (陈子柔), Ph.D. Candidate, University of Toronto

主持人：左思 助理教授 上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院

时　间：2025年10月14日（周二）9:00-10:30

地　点：上海交通大学 徐汇校区 安泰经济与管理学院A511

内容简介:

We study the gifting behavior of consumers and leaderboard design in the context of livestreaming. Using real-time data from TikTok, we provide causal evidence for two distinct gifting motives: the competitive motive and the appreciation motive. The appreciation motive reflects the tendency to gift in response to popular content. The competitive motive arises from TikTok’s gifting leaderboard, which prominently displays the ranks and cumulative gifting amounts of the top three contributors. This public visibility creates incentives to compete for recognition and social utility. We find that the strength of the competitive motive depends on the consumer’s relative position: when a consumer’s cumulative gifting amount is far from that of immediate competitors, the return from competing diminishes, reducing the competitive motive. To evaluate the economic value of the leaderboard and guide the design of the leaderboard, we build and estimate a continuous-time dynamic game model of consumers’ gifting behavior. Our results show that, for an average session, the leaderboard-induced competitive motive accounts for 43% of the total revenue. We also conduct leaderboard design to manage the competitive intensity and optimize the platform revenue. We find that (1) reducing the number of rewarded top ranks from three to two intensifies the competition among top-ranked consumers, increasing total revenue by 2.9%; and (2) revising the scoring system to weigh recent gifting activity more heavily increases revenue by 19.7%. Our findings underscore the critical role of leaderboards in driving engagement on digital platforms and the importance of leaderboard design in optimizing platform revenue.

演讲人简介：

Zirou Chen is a Ph.D. Candidate in Quantitative Marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Her research interests span the economics of digital technologies and AI, platform strategy and media consumption. In her job market paper, “Competitive Gamification in Digital Consumption: Evidence from TikTok”, she analyzes a large-scale dataset of livestream sessions to study how competitive leaderboards shape viewers’ gifting behavior and platform revenue. Beyond this work, she also examines how recommender systems affect consumer search and firm strategy. Her work employs structural modeling, causal inference, and analytical modeling to address pressing questions in marketing.

欢迎广大师生参加!