Alleles of State Dependence on Digital Platforms: A Dynamic Path to Purchase with Variety Seeking and Inertia

Digital platforms in repeat-purchase categories face a tension between facilitating inertial purchases from the same seller and encouraging variety seeking across sellers. Inertia toward a seller may increase contemporaneous conversion but may elevate the risk of platform disintermediation. Variety seeking can strengthen platform stickiness but may come at the expense of foregoing the conversion benefits of familiar options. It is unclear which tendency better serves the platform and how these tendencies unfold across stages of a purchase episode. Using clickstream data on consumers' path to purchase from a mobile food-ordering platform, we show the coexistence of these tendencies within a single purchase episode: variety seeking during consideration-set formation and inertia at final choice. We identify this pattern with a two-stage structural model that accommodates heterogeneous consumer preferences and correlated unobservables across stages. Counterfactual analyses indicate that nudging the ranking in the impression set to encourage exploration increases revenue by 4.56%. Moreover, contextualized ranking interventions based on consumers' category experience, inter-session elapsed time, and platform-wide promotions further amplify these gains, yielding revenue increases of 5.59% to 6.12%. In contrast, a conventional one-stage model detects inertia but misses the consideration-stage variety seeking tendency, biasing policy toward reinforcing inertia and thereby forgoing substantial revenue. These findings contribute to theories of state dependence by conceptualizing inertia and variety seeking as stage-contingent behaviors rather than fixed consumer types and have direct implications for platform ranking design.

• 저널MIS Quarterly · 1–20
• 토픽Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing · Marketing
• DOI10.25300/misq/2026/18599
• 저자Yanlai Chu, Hongju Liu, Qiang Liu