An Empirical Analysis of User Content Generation and Usage Behavior in Mobile Digital Media

Different kinds of user-generated content are becoming available in mobile digital and web media settings as well spurred by the rapid advances in the cellular telephony market. We use a unique dataset of individual-level mobile records to study the nature of interdependencies between users’ content generation and content usage behavior. While theories of resource constraints from economics posit the existence of a negative interdependency between content generation and usage, theories of social exchange from sociology posit the existence of a positive interdependency between these two activities. Hence, the final directional nature of this interdependency is an empirical question. We find that there exist negative inter-temporal interdependencies between the content generation and usage behavior. The effect is also asymmetric such that the negative impact of previous period’s content generation on current period’s content usage is higher than vice-versa. Managerial implications for discounting in data transmission prices are discussed.