A Multilevel Mechanism-Based Model of Human Agents, Machine Agents, and Offerings’ Collective Outcomes on Digital Platforms

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2025-01-07

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6315

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We propose a model of how the attributes of a product or service offered on an e-commerce digital platform affect this offering’s collective outcomes (e.g., total sales). The model is based on the premise that the representation of offerings on contemporary e-commerce platforms is shaped by human agents (e.g., customers and providers) and machine agents (e.g., the platform's internal algorithms and external bots). While some agents directly adjust an offering’s representation—like modifying its price—others indirectly impact its attractiveness through actions such as reviews and search results manipulations. The multilevel mechanism-based model posits that an offering representation displayed at the macro level—the platform—affects micro-level individual human and machine agent perceptions and actions. It explains how the results of micro-level agent actions coalesce at the macro level into an offering’s collective outcomes. The model explains human agents’ actions with social mechanisms and machine agents’ actions with computational mechanisms.

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Socio-Technical Issues in Organizational Information Technologies, digital platform, human agents, machine agents, mechanism, user commitment

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10

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Proceedings of the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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