How Is the Mobile Internet Different Search Costs and Local.pdfVIP

Information Systems Research Articles in Advance, pp. 1–19 ISSN 1047-7047 (print) ISSN 1526-5536 (online) /10.1287/isre.1120.0453 © 2012 INFORMS How Is the Mobile Internet Different? r o Search Costs and Local Activities y l l a c i Anindya Ghose n o Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, New York 10012, aghose@ r t c e . Avi Goldfarb l g e r Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3E6, Canada, o d . agoldfarb@rotman.utoronto.ca e s t m s o r Sang Pil Han o p f College of Business, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, sangphan@.hk n e i b @ o s e explore how Internet browsing behavior varies between mobile phones and personal computers. Smaller t n Wscreen sizes on mobile phones increase the cost to the user of browsing for information. In addition, t o o i a wider range of offline locations for mobile Internet usage suggests that local activities are particularly impor- n s s s i tant. Using data on user behavior at a (Twitter-like) microblogging service, we exploit exogenous variation in i m d r the ranking mechanism of posts to identify the ranking effects. We show that (1) ranking effects are higher on n e mobile phones suggesting higher search costs: links that appear at the