Three essays on the influence of mobile technologies on social precepts, economic matching, and public health

Abstract

The mobile revolution has dramatically changed the way we live, communicate, engage in economic functions, and manage health. Mobile technologies often provide solutions to many of the social and economic challenges that we face. Simultaneously, however, they also generate adverse effects that threaten adherence to ethical precepts and social functioning. Contemporary society has witnessed the swift emergence of overdependence on mobile technologies as a serious social issue. Addiction to mobile innovations brings forth enormous social and economic costs, thereby jeopardizing public safety, health, and welfare. At the same time, such advancements are vehicles of considerable improvement in economic welfare and health. This is especially evident in business domains, where inadequacies have arisen from inefficient communication and coordination between marketing managers and customers. These coordination failures have generated substantial social costs, reduced economic matching, and led to resource misallocation problems that can be addressed by mobile platforms. By offering effective and personalized communication between buyers and sellers, mobile innovations enhance business opportunities and increased consumer welfare. Another illustration of the beneficial potential of mobile technologies comes in the form of healthcare apps, which are changing the manner by which people manage unhealthy behaviors and helping them learn to improve their health conditions. In response to the call to identify the social, economic, and health benefits and costs derived from mobile innovations, we conducted three studies, each addressing a separate issue. The first explores smartphone users’ compulsive use of mobile apps and put forward effective solutions through which mobile addiction can be curbed. On the basis of a rational addiction framework, we developed a theoretical model that pertains to mobile app usage patterns and analyzed unique panel data on the actual usage of mobile social apps to validate the framework. The second study delves into contextual mobile coupon targeting, which can augment the efficacy of digital marketing targeting through context-based promotions. Randomized field experiments were carried out to demonstrate how mobile technologies and contextual targeting in tandem enable marketers to reach the right customers with the right incentives and consequently elevate digital marketing performance. The third study investigates the efficacy of a mobile health app designed for the management of overweight and obesity, which are becoming pervasive and serious health problems. Using a hidden Markov approach, we identified the hidden states that reflect the strengths of users’ will to lose weight and determined the effectiveness of the app in helping individuals address overweight and obesity.