How Is the Mobile Internet Different? Search Costs and Local Activities

TLDR

Smaller screens on mobile phones raise browsing costs, and the broader range of offline locations makes local activities especially relevant. The study investigates how browsing behavior differs between mobile phones and personal computers and considers implications for future Internet commerce. The authors analyze user data from a microblogging platform, exploiting exogenous changes in post ranking to identify ranking effects. They find that ranking effects are stronger on mobile phones—top‑screen links are more frequently clicked—and that proximity matters more, making the mobile Internet less “Internet‑like” with higher search costs and greater distance sensitivity.

Abstract

We explore how Internet browsing behavior varies between mobile phones and personal computers. Smaller screen sizes on mobile phones increase the cost to the user of browsing for information. In addition, a wider range of offline locations for mobile Internet usage suggests that local activities are particularly important. Using data on user behavior at a (Twitter-like) microblogging service, we exploit exogenous variation in the ranking mechanism of posts to identify the ranking effects. We show that (1) ranking effects are higher on mobile phones suggesting higher search costs: links that appear at the top of the screen are especially likely to be clicked on mobile phones and (2) the benefit of browsing for geographically close matches is higher on mobile phones: stores located in close proximity to a user's home are much more likely to be clicked on mobile phones. Thus, the mobile Internet is somewhat less “Internet-like”: search costs are higher and distance matters more. We speculate on how these changes may affect the future direction of Internet commerce.