How Is the Mobile Internet Different? Search Costs and Local Activities

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Penn collection
Finance Papers
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
mobile Internet
search costs
ranking effects
cognitive load
recency effects
local interests
microblogging
social media
hierarchical Bayesian methods
Business
Economics
Finance and Financial Management
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Ghose, Anindya
Goldfarb, David
Han, Sang Pil
Contributor
Abstract

We explore how Internet browsing behavior varies between mobile phones and personal computers. Smaller screen sizes on mobile phones increase the cost to the user of browsing for information. In addition, a wider range of offline locations for mobile Internet usage suggests that local activities are particularly important. Using data on user behavior at a (Twitter-like) microblogging service, we exploit exogenous variation in the ranking mechanism of posts to identify the ranking effects. We show that (1) ranking effects are higher on mobile phones suggesting higher search costs: links that appear at the top of the screen are especially likely to be clicked on mobile phones and (2) the benefit of browsing for geographically close matches is higher on mobile phones: stores located in close proximity to a user's home are much more likely to be clicked on mobile phones. Thus, the mobile Internet is somewhat less “Internet-like”: search costs are higher and distance matters more. We speculate on how these changes may affect the future direction of Internet commerce.

Advisor
Date Range for Data Collection (Start Date)
Date Range for Data Collection (End Date)
Digital Object Identifier
Series name and number
Publication date
2013-09-01
Journal title
Information Systems Research
Volume number
Issue number
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Journal Issue
Comments
Recommended citation
Collection