We were honored to host Paulo Albuquerque from INSEAD, who gave the first talk of our Research Seminar Series in 2023. His outstanding research focuses on the introduction of new products, consumer search and online games.

Paulo Albuquerque presented his paper “Motivating Product Usage with Conditional Activities: An Application to Online Education”. This research project investigates usage of products with conditional activities – activities where one is a prerequisite for the other – within the context of online education. The authors developed a multiple discrete-continuous time allocation model, which accounts for the link between the two activities. They test their model by conducting two large-scale field experiments in collaboration with an online education provider, where children had to do math lessons in order to access gamified content.

They find that not accounting for the relationship between the two activities significantly biases estimates of preferences. Based on these results, their recommendations on amount of math and game content increased subscriptions to the online platform by 10% without hurting participation.

It was a pleasure to listen to your work, Paulo Albuquerque!