【公开学术报告-第141期】Competitive Gamification in Digital Consumption: Evidence from TikTok

Competitive Gamification in Digital Consumption: Evidence from TikTok

Speaker: Zirou CHEN (Ph.D. Candidate in Marketing, University of Toronto)

Date & Time: Mon. 13, October 2025, from 10:30 to 12:00 (Beijing Time)

Place: Tongji Building A2101 

ABSTRACT

We study the gifting behavior of consumers and gamification design in the context of livestreaming. We utilize real-time data from TikTok to identify two different motives for gift giving by the consumers: the competitive motive and the appreciation motive. The appreciation motive captures the gifting tendency on popular content. The competitive motive stems from the fact that there is a gifting leaderboard on TikTok, in which the ranks and cumulative gifting amount of the top 3 gifters are prominently displayed. This creates a competitive motive for gift giving since the consumers prominently displayed on the leaderboard gain social utility from recognition. We find that the competitive motive for a consumer depends on how far the gifting amount is away from the competitors. When a consumer’s gifting amount is substantially away from that of immediate competitors, the return from competing diminishes, reducing the incentive to gift competitively. We then build and estimate a continuous-time dynamic game model of consumers’ gifting behavior to disentangle the two motives and to better design the leaderboard that improves the earnings for the platform. Our results show that on average across all sessions, the competitive motive accounts for 21.6% higher revenue for the platform compared to the appreciation motive. Regarding the leaderboard design to manage the competitive intensity, 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 6.5%; and (2) revising the performance metrics to weigh recent gifting activity more heavily intensify the competition among all consumers, yielding a 45% increase in total revenue. Our findings underscore the role of competitive motives in driving engagement in digital consumption and highlight the importance of gamification design in optimizing platform revenue.

Keywords: Gamification, competition, livestreaming, leaderboard, moment-to-moment data, high-frequency identification, continuous-time dynamic game

GUEST BIO:

Zirou Chen is a Ph.D. Candidate in Marketing at the University of Toronto (2020–present), under the supervision of a committee chaired by Nitin Mehta. She earned an M.A. in Economics from the University of Rochester (2015–2018) and dual degrees in Economics (B.A.) and Mathematics (B.S.) from Wuhan University (2011–2015). Drawing on expertise in economics, mathematics, and marketing, her research develops empirical and analytical models to address marketing challenges shaped by strategic consumers and digital technologies. Her work covers gamification, recommender systems, and large language models, centered around the theme Strategic Consumers in the Age of Digital Technology. She uses structural modeling, causal inference, game theory, and experimental methods.