Understanding the behavior of users online is important for researchers, policymakers, and private companies alike. But observing online behavior and conducting experiments is difficult without direct access to the user base and software of technology companies. We introduce Webmunk, an open-source tool designed to make conducting online studies much easier. The user-facing side of Webmunk is a browser extension that can track consumer browsing behavior and experimentally modify consumers experiences as they browse the Internet. It can be installed just like any other browser extension, such as ad blockers. Through this extension, researchers can collect a host of consumer data, from URLs to web page HTML elements, clicks, and scroll positions. The extension can also modify information and change the look of a web page, allowing for researchers to implement interventions that vary across study participants. A key advantage of this approach is that interventions occur while participants are engaging in real world activities such as shopping, browsing the news, using social media, or searching for information. We demonstrate the power of Webmunk by discussing two studies in progress.
Authors
- Acknowledgements & Disclosure
- We thank Tesary Lin and Alexander MacKay for productive collaborations using Webmunk and for valuable comments on this paper. Jean-Michael Lambert and Wenhan Wang provided helpful additional software development. Chris Wheeler and Ericka Menchen-Trevino reviewed the software infrastructure, which gave us important feedback to improve it further. We thank James Dana, Yutao Chen, Debbie Liang, Hayden Schrauff, Yunjie Song, Richard Xu, and Hannah Zhang for outstanding research assistance. We thank Stefan Bucher for comments on the draft. We acknowledge the Digital Business Institute at Boston University, the Platform Lab within the D^3 Institute at Harvard Business School, and the Internet Society Foundation for helping to fund the project. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3386/w32694
- Pages
- 27
- Published in
- United States of America
Table of Contents
- Webmunk's Functionalities 5
- What Can Webmunk Track? 7
- What Can Webmunk Manipulate? 11
- Case Studies 13
- Webmunk Project Requirements—What to Look for When Hiring Developers 16
- Technical and Implementation Details 18
- Technical Details About Webmunk Browser Extensions 18
- Technical Details About Webmunk's Cloud Infrastructure 22
- Conclusion 25
