Marketing Department's Lecture

Theme：A Structural Model of Customer Learning on Mobile Payment

Speaker：Shaohui WU (Tsinghua University)

Time：2019-06-12 10:00

Address：Room 205, Mingde Business Building

Language：English/Chinese

Abstract：

As one of the prominent areas of FinTech, mobile payment is increasingly accepted by more and more consumers. To investigate consumer mobile payment usage behavior, we develop a Bayesian learning structural model using a rich data set from JD.com, the largest direct selling online retailer in China. We first find that there exist two significant learning processes on consumer mobile payment usage, i.e., mobile channel learning and online payment learning. While the former is more promotion focus on benefit, the latter is more prevention focus on uncertainty. As a result, consumer mobile channel learning is faster than online payment learning. Second, we find a significant inertial effect of customers’ payment experience in JD.com on both learning processes. High membership level customers at JD.com are less likely to migrate from PC channel to the mobile channel, and also from offline cash-on-delivery payment to online payment than low membership level customers. Finally, our policy simulations further show the promotion frequency has a positive effect on mobile payment usage. The more promotion frequency opportunities for customers, the higher mobile payment usage rates would be. Compared to the promotion frequency, the promotion amount has a positive but diminishing effect on customers’ mobile payment usage. Our policy simulations suggest that increasing promotion frequency while decreasing promotion amount could significantly facilitate customers’ learning and increase customers’ mobile payment rates. We show that the promotion effect would increase about 44% by policy optimization without extra costs. Our results provide important implications on facilitating the diffusion of mobile payment and possibly FinTech innovations in general.

Short biography：
Shaohui WU is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Marketing in the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University. His research interests mainly focus on mobile analytics, mobile payment, social media, etc. His papers are now under review at Information Systems Research (one of top three journals in information systems). During his Ph.D. program, he won many awards, including 2019 Beijing Outstanding Graduates Award, Tsinghua First Class Scholarship (2017, 2018), best paper award (second prize) in the Journal of Marketing Science (JMS) Annual Doctoral Consortium, and best paper award in 2018 China Big Data and Business Analytics Conference.