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Dr. Hengchen Dai
Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations and Behavioral Decision Making
UCLA

As digitization enables service platforms to access users’ information, important questions arise about how digital service platforms should disseminate information to improve service capacity and enjoyment. We examine a strategy that involves providing customer-related information to individual service providers at the beginning of a service encounter. We causally evaluate this strategy via a field experiment on a large live-streaming platform that connects viewers and individual broadcasters. When viewers entered shows, we provided viewer-related information to broadcasters who were randomly assigned to the treatment condition (but not to control broadcasters). Our analysis, involving a subsample of 49,998 broadcasters, demonstrates that relative to control broadcasters, treatment broadcasters expanded service capacity by 12.62% by increasing both show frequency (3.31%) and show length (7.10%), thus earning 10.44% more based on our conservative estimate. Moreover, our intervention increased service enjoyment (measured by viewer watch time) by 4.51%. Two surveys and additional analyses provide evidence for two mechanisms and rule out several alternative explanations. Our low-cost, information-based intervention has important implications for digital service platforms that have little control over service providers’ work schedules and service quality.