Impact of Mobile Channel Adoption in Goal-directed Platforms

Abstract

With the ubiquity of mobile devices and an increasing trend in extending real-world activities into the virtual, goal-directed platforms have experienced rising popularity as they provide individuals with enhanced capabilities for goal pursuit. Prior literature has demonstrated the important role of the diversity in goal pursuit approaches to individuals’ goal pursuit activities. However, a few studies have investigated the technology-mediated goal pursuits especially how mobile channel, as an additional means of web-based goal pursuit means, will affect users’ goal pursuit. In this research, we start with the theoretical perspective of affordance and goal pursuit theory, and then perform a series of empirical analyses to examine the impacts of multi-channel adoption on goal pursuit activity and persistence. Our results indicate that mobile adoption improves overall goal pursuit effort by 140.1%. A positive impact on goal pursuit persistence is also observed. Users spend 0.656 days learning content after they adopted mobile channel. Most notably, users with varying levels of goal specificity and goal pursuit competency benefit differently from the adoption of the mobile channel. Particularly, users with high-level goal specificity are observed to spent 0.234 more days and 56.5% more effort in their goal pursuit compared to uses with a less specific goal. Robustness checks and replication of data analyses further validate our findings under various scenarios.

Keywords: goal-directed platform, multi-channel, mobile adoption, goal pursuit effort, goal pursuit persistence