An Empirical Study on the Effects of Regulation in Online Gaming Industry via Vector Autoregression Model

This study empirically examines the effects of regulation on online gaming. Going beyond ad hoc heuristic approaches on individual behavior, we investigate the effects of regulation on dynamic changes of games or service providers. In particular, we propose three theoretical perspectives: social influence to investigate the regulation effect, the role of prior experience to determine the difference in the regulation effect size through users’ prior experience, and network externalities to discover the difference in the regulation effect size according to the number of users on an online gaming platform. We use the vector autoregression methodology to model patterns of the co-movement of online games and to forecast game usage. We find that online gamers are heterogeneous. Therefore, policy makers should make suitable regulations for each heterogeneous group to effectively avoid generating gaming addicts without interrupting the economic growth of the online gaming industry.