Gamified System Effectiveness on Social Trading Platforms

To motivate user engagement and generate desired engagement outcomes, some social trading platforms have introduced gamified systems with hierarchical badges and financial incentives. However, previous studies have not examined the effectiveness of such an application. Based on data collected from a popular social trading platform, eToro, we empirically examine the effectiveness of the gamified system and its mechanism. Results indicate that the gamified system under social trading is effective in inducing user-to-user and user-to-system interactions, thus leading to some desired engagement outcomes on social media. However, the gamified system does not contribute to the engagement outcomes on financial investment. Our paper contributes to the literature on both gamification and social trading, highlighting gamification's important practical implications for platform managers, cautioning against the possible ineffectiveness of the dual-outcome gamified system and shedding light on the design of gamified systems. © 2022 International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2022: "Digitization for the Next Generation". All Rights Reserved.