Nudging the internet: behavioural expertise in the platform economy

Abstract

This thesis follows ‘nudge theory’ (Thaler and Sunstein 2009) into the platform economy and examines how behavioural expertise is organised and made to work, to feel and move users. The prevailing critical and commercial accounts of online nudging tend to overrationalise the workings of techniques, hype up their effectiveness and abstract away from the practical work realities within which they are performed. Drawing on ‘pragmatic’ studies of markets, technologies, and organisations, this research presents an empirical study of online nudging, based on 30 original interviews with behavioural experts working in various roles in the platform economy, including product managers, user researchers, data scientists, designers, and marketers. The research reveals how ‘nudge’ as a frame – as an explanation of platformised interactions – and as a network – comprising people and practices – spread; and how data-intensive commercial nudging works in practice, within proximate organisational or market settings.

I find that while behavioural economic science has become a shared background to contemporary interaction design, actors selectively activate scientific rhetorical sources. Conversely, most observable instances of nudging in the platform economy, are decoupled from behavioural theory, and instead manifest as local product optimisations driven by iterative, data-driven testing assemblages aimed at enhancing product metrics through real time user feedback. Numbers, not nudges, serve as the central organising device in contemporary product development, shaping the character and value of work, and reinforcing incremental, ‘piecemeal’ and ‘A/B testable’ (as interviewees refer to them) changes often preselected for their anticipated performance against metrics. The ubiquity of nudging is better understood as an effect of technical, organisational and market arrangements within which products and interactions are designed in the platform economy, rather than as a technique that moved into the field because of its inherent efficacy in feeling and moving users. By contextualising nudging within practical arrangements, this study contributes to the platform economy literature, and offers insights into platformised interactions, their designs, as well as misfires.