User Content Generation and Usage Behavior in Multi-media Settings: A Dynamic Structural Model of Learning

Consumer adoption and usage of mobile communication and multimedia content services has been growing steadily over the past few years in many countries around the world. In this paper, we develop and estimate a dynamic structural model of user behavior and learning with regard to content generation and usage activities in mobile multi-media environments. We model that users make content choices based on how well the content matches their taste. Users learn about two different categories of content – content from regular Internet social networking and community (SNC) sites and that from mobile portal sites. Then they can choose to engage in the creation (uploading) and consumption (downloading) of multi-media content from these two categories of websites. In our context, users have two sources of learning about content match value – (i) direct experience through their own content creation and usage behavior and (ii) indirect experience through word-of-mouth such as the content creation and usage behavior of their social network neighbors. Our model seeks to explicitly explain the underlying mechanism of user content generation and usage in mobile multi-media settings and examine how direct and indirect experiences influence the content creation and usage behavior of users over time. We develop a dynamic structural model. We estimate this model using a unique dataset of consumers‟ mobile media content creation and usage behavior over a 3-month time period. Our estimates suggest that when it comes to user learning from direct experience, the content downloaded from mobile portal sites has the highest level of mean match value. In contrast, the content downloaded from Internet SNC sites has the lowest level of mean match value. In terms of the magnitude of estimates, the standard deviation of indirect experience signals is higher than the standard deviation of direct experience signals. That is, in the mobile multi-media context, learning based on direct experience is more reliable (has less variability) than learning based on indirect experience. We use our estimates to assess the importance of learning through different counterfactual experiments. Our policy simulations suggest that the impact of an increase in content match value on the propensity to download content from mobile portal sites is higher for the segment that is geographically more mobile. In contrast, the impact of an increase in content match value on the propensity to upload content to mobile portal sites is higher for the segment that is geographically less mobile. Potential implications for mobile phone operators and mobile advertisers are discussed.