Research

My research investigates human behavior and decision-making in digital environments, sitting at the intersection of information systems and the choices people make online. I approach this through several connected streams: how game-like design shapes motivation, how user-generated content supports (or misleads) decisions, how social structure governs life in online communities, and how the technical conditions of play shape the experience itself.

Gamification

How do the design elements that are common in games affect a decision maker’s thought process? I explore the utilization of features that are taken from game design elements, such as points, leaderboards, and badges (or achievements/trophies) across a number of contexts.

…and wellness

The primary thrust of my gamification research has been in wellness. In collaboration with University Parking and Transportation services, my coauthors and I ran a large-scale field experiment with several thousand bicycle riders at a large campus and tested various badge designs (“Ingredients for successful badges: evidence from a field experiment in bike commuting”, European Journal of Information Systems, 2020), as well as offering different reward levels (“Do We Need Different Levels of Badges for Users with Different Participation Levels? A Field Experiment from a Bicycle Commuting Program”, International Conference on Information Systems, 2019).

Other work in this space includes the application of lightweight online support (such as “likes” on Facebook) to the wellness context where we find that giving Kudos to people on an exercise social network helps to support exercise behavior (The Effects of Digitally Delivered Nudges in a Corporate Wellness Program, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 2023).

User-Generated Content

Product Reviews

In the online shopping context, decision making processes are wildly different when compared to brick-and-mortar stores, especially when choosing between products. Absent an ability to physically interact with a product, product reviews become crucial for decision-making.

Here, I engage in two primary streams of research. First is determining trust in a review through the use of reviewer indicator badges (Biased but Credible: An Experimental Study of Online Reviews, AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 2024). Second is the problem of information overload: with thousands of reviews available, how should they be sorted and profiled to actually support a shopper? Drawing on information foraging theory and unsupervised learning, this work develops mechanisms to navigate large volumes of reviews and surfaces a counterintuitive result—apparent high-quality signals can steer people toward worse outcomes (Information & Management, 2026).

Games, Reviews, and Psychological Needs

Separately, I use the reviews players leave to understand why they play. I am developing computational methods to categorize games on Steam by the psychological needs they satisfy, inferring needs satisfaction directly from user-generated text. A related project examines how multiplayer gaming met social needs during COVID-19 quarantines, and shows that lightweight, computationally efficient NLP methods can match or exceed much larger language models at recovering these signals from review text. (in progress, presented at INFORMS 2023, NEAIS 2025)

Online Communities

People invest enormous time in online communities like Reddit. What keeps them coming back—and what happens to that commitment as a community grows? My work here advances a visibility-cost framework, explaining how shifts in social visibility and the cost of participating reshape members’ commitment as communities scale (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2026).

Game Streaming and Latency

Cloud gaming promises to decouple play from expensive local hardware, but it introduces latency that conventional wisdom says should ruin the experience. In an experimental study of game streaming, I find surprising resilience in player satisfaction and behavior, challenging assumptions about how much technical performance actually constrains engagement. (under review, presented at AMCIS 2025)