S (2010) A dynamic structural model of user learning in mobile media content. Working paper, SSRN

Consumer adoption and usage of mobile-based multimedia content services has been growing steadily over the past few years in many countries around the world. In this paper, we develop and estimate a structural model of users ’ dynamic learning in mobile digital media environments with regard to multimedia content generation and usage activities on the Internet. Users learn about two different categories of mobile content usage – content from regular Internet social networking websites and that from mobile portal sites and then choose to engage in the creation (uploading) and consumption (downloading) of these two categories of content. In our model, users have two sources of learning about mobile content quality – (i) direct expe-rience through their own content creation and usage activities on the Internet, and (ii) indirect experience through word-of-mouth such as the content creation and usage behavior of their social network neighbors. Our model seeks to explicitly explain how direct usage experience and indirect experience from social inte-ractions influence the content creation and usage behavior of users over time. We estimate this model using a unique dataset of several hundred users ’ mobile media usage over a 13 week time period. Our estimates suggest that when it comes to users ’ learning from direct experience, the content that is downloaded from mobile portal websites exhibits the highest level of consistency in quality. In contrast to this, content that is uploaded by users to regular websites on the Internet exhibits the least amount of consistency in quality