The Tradeoff between Online Community Activity and Consumption: Evidence from Online Poker

This research explores the connection between online consumption and online community participation activity. Using longitudinal data that contains detailed information about 4,475 online poker players´ gaming activity and online community activity over 58 months, this paper finds that the general positive relationship between consumption and community activity is very strong at the level of the community, but weak at the level of individual participants. Participants experience a trade-off between community activity and consumption. An analysis of consumer lifecycles reveals that community activity substitutes actual consumption: Consumers increase community activity and decrease consumption during their usage of the poker service.