Does David Make A Goliath? Impact of Rival’s Expertise Signals on Online User Engagement

How can digital platforms and applications engage users? This question remains of foremost interest to managers of such digital settings. In this study, we offer an informational answer to this problem, showing that digital contexts that engage users through contests and competitions can leverage information signals about rivals to influence engagement. More precisely, we show that the effect of relative and absolute information about rival expertise has a distinct influence on the focal user’s engagement in a two-player online vocabulary game. Our findings offer several recommendations for the formulation and disclosure of rival expertise information. First, we suggest that information about rival expertise should have a dynamic salience based on the actual gameplay outcomes. Second, we recommend that platforms collect information about players’ motivational framing (competitive versus learning) and use it as input when disclosing rival expertise information, as we find significant heterogeneity based on their motivational framing in their responses to such information.