Professor Vili Lehdonvirta

Vili is an economic sociologist who studies the design and socioeconomic implications of digital marketplaces and platforms, using conventional social research methods as well as novel data science approaches. His particular areas of expertise are virtual economies and online work.

Email: vili.lehdonvirta@oii.ox.ac.uk

Tel: +44 (0) 745 6420012

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Professor Vili Lehdonvirta is an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, a Hugh Price Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, London.

His research deals with the design and socioeconomic implications of digital marketplaces and platforms, using conventional social research methods and novel data science approaches. He has a PhD in Economic Sociology from Turku School of Economics (2009) and an MSc in Information Networks from Helsinki University of Technology (2005). Previously he worked at London School of Economics, University of Tokyo, and Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. Before his academic career, he worked as a game programmer. He has advised companies, startups, and policy makers in the United States, Europe, and Japan, including Rovio, Warner Brothers, and the World Bank. His book Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (with Edward Castronova) is published by MIT Press and translated to Chinese by China Renmin University Press. (LinkedIn, Google Scholar)

For more details, see Vili’s home page.

Areas of Interest for Doctoral Supervision

digital marketplaces, e-commerce, platform business, app stores, games, virtual currencies, crowdsourcing, online freelancing, volunteer work, ‘the gig economy’, and labour movements; especially from sociological, organization studies, and science and technology studies (STS) perspectives

Research interests

virtual goods, virtual property, digital money, digital games, persuasive technology, online work, microwork, microsourcing, crowdsourcing, gold farming, platforms, platform business, institutional theory, sociology of consumption, sociology of work, organization theory, ICT for development, East Asia

Positions held at the OII

  • Associate Professor, May 2016 –
  • Senior Research Fellow, May 2016 –
  • Director of DPhil programme, October 2014 – December 2016
  • Research Fellow, May 2013 – May 2016

Latest blog posts

Current projects

Past projects

Books

  • Lehdonvirta, V. and Castronova, E. (2014) Virtual Economies Design and Analysis. MIT Press.

Chapters

  • Lehdonvirta, V. (2013) "A history of the digitalization of consumer culture" In: Digital Virtual Consumption. 11-28.
  • El-Fatatry, M., Lee, S., Khan, T. and Lehdonvirta, V. (2011) "A digital media approach to Islamic marketing" In: Handbook of Islamic Marketing. 338-360.

Conference papers

  • Wood, A., Graham, M., Lehdonvirta, V., Barnard, H. and Hjorth, I. (2016) "Virtual Production Networks: Fixing Commodification and Disembeddedness", Development Studies Association 2016.
  • Wood, A., Graham, M. and Lehdonvirta, V. (2016) "The new frontier of outsourcing: online labour markets and the consequences for poverty in the Global South.", Work, Employment and Society Conference. SAGE Publications (UK and US).
  • Wood, A., Graham, M., Lehdonvirta, V., Barnard, H. and Hjorth, I. (2016) "Virtual Production Networks: Fixing Commodification and Disembeddedness", GPNs and social upgrading: labour and beyond - Workshop.
  • Kassi, O.A., Lehdonvirta, V., Graham, M., Barnard, H. and Hjorth, I. (2016) “Not a Lot of People Know Where It Is”: Liabilities of Origin in Online Contract Work. Collective Intelligence, NYU, New York, 31 May – 2 September 2016.
  • Kassi, O. and Lehdonvirta, V. (2016) "Building the Online Labour Index: A Tool for Policy and Research", CSCW 2016 workshop on The Future of Platforms as Sites of Work, Collaboration and Trust,.
  • Lehdonvirta, V., Barnard, H., Graham, M. and Hjorth, I. (2014) "Online labour markets - levelling the playing field for international service markets?", IPP2014: Crowdsourcing for Politics and Policy conference, University of Oxford,.
  • Hosio, S., Goncalves, J., Lehdonvirta, V., Ferreira, D. and Kostakos, V. (2014) "Situated crowdsourcing using a market model", UIST 2014 - Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. 55-64.
  • Ratan, R., Lehdonvirta, V., Kennedy, T. and Williams, D. (2012) "Razing the virtual glass ceiling: Gendered economic disparity in two massive online games", ICA Annual Conference.
  • Liu, Y., Lehdonvirta, V., Alexandrova, T. and Nakajima, T. (2012) "Drawing on mobile crowds via social media Case UbiAsk: Image based mobile social search across languages", Multimedia Systems. 18 (1) 53-67.
  • Liu, Y., Alexandrova, T., Nakajima, T. and Lehdonvirta, V. (2011) "Mobile image search via local crowd: A user study", Proceedings - 1st International Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems, Networks, and Applications, CPSNA 2011, Workshop Held During RTCSA 2011. 2 109-112.
  • Liu, Y., Lehdonvirta, V., Alexandrova, T. and Nakajima, T. (2011) "Real-Time Crowd Computing Using Social Media", CrowdConf 2011.
  • Liu, Y., Lehdonvirta, V., Alexandrova, T., Liu, M. and Nakajima, T. (2011) "Engaging Social Medias: Case Mobile Crowdsourcing", First International Workshop on Social Media Engagement (SoME 2011), 20th International World Wide Web Conference.
  • Liu, Y., Lehdonvirta, V., Kleppe, M., Alexandrova, T., Kimura, H. and Nakajima, T. (2010) "A Crowdsourcing Based Mobile Image Translation and Knowledge Sharing Service", Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2010).
  • Yamabe, T., Lehdonvirta, V., Ito, H., Soma, H., Kimura, H. and Nakajima, T. (2010) "Activity-based micro-pricing: Realizing sustainable behavior changes through economic incentives", Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). 6137 LNCS 193-204.
  • Lehdonvirta, V. (2010) "Digital free time: social leisure and leisurely shopping in online peer groups", XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology RC13/RC23 joint session on Emerging Technologies and Leisure.
  • Lehdonvirta, V., Soma, H., Ito, H., Yamabe, T., Kimura, H. and Nakajima, T. (2009) "UbiPay: Minimizing transaction costs with smart mobile payments", Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Mobile Technology, Application and Systems, Mobility '09.
  • Takayama, C., Lehdonvirta, V., Shiraishi, M., Washio, Y., Kimura, H. and Nakajima, T. (2009) "ECOISLAND: A system for persuading users to reduce CO2 emissions", Proceedings - 1st International Workshop on Software Technologies for Future Dependable Distributed Systems, STFSSD 2009. 59-63.
  • Shiraishi, M., Lehdonvirta, V., Washio, Y., Kimura, H., Takayama, C. and Nakajima, T. (2009) "Tracking behavior in persuasive apps: Is sensor-based detection always better than user self-reporting?", Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. 4045-4050.
  • Shiraishi, M., Washio, Y., Takayama, C., Lehdonvirta, V., Kimura, H. and Nakajima, T. (2009) "Using individual, social and economic persuasion techniques to reduce CO 2 emissions in a family setting", ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. 350.
  • Nakajima, T., Lehdonvirta, V., Tokunaga, E. and Kimura, H. (2008) "Reflecting human behavior to motivate desirable lifestyle", Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques, DIS. 405-414.
  • Lehdonvirta, V., Kimura, H., Soma, H., Nakajima, T. and Ito, H. (2008) "UbiPay: Conducting everyday payments with minimum user involvement", Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. 3537-3542.
  • Nakajima, T., Kimura, H., Yamabe, T., Lehdonvirta, V., Takayama, C., Shiraishi, M. and Washio, Y. (2008) "Using aesthetic and empathetic expressions to motivate desirable lifestyle", Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). 5279 LNCS 220-234.
  • Nakajima, T., Lehdonvirta, V., Tokunaga, E., Ayabe, M., Kimura, H. and Okuda, Y. (2007) "Lifestyle ubiquitous gaming: Making daily lives more plesurable", Proceedings - 13th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications, RTCSA 2007. 257-264.

Journal articles

Reports

  • Lehdonvirta, V. and Robleh, A. (2016) "Governance and Regulation" In: Distributed Ledger Technology: Beyond Blockchain. London: UK Government Office for Science.
  • Lehdonvirta, V. and Ernkvist, M. (2011) Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy. Washington DC.
  • Lehdonvirta, V. (2011) "Digital labour in online games" In: O. Sotamaa et al. (eds), New Paradigms for Digital Games: The Finnish Perspective. Tampere: University of Tampere.
  • Lehdonvirta, V. and Huotari, K. (2010) Advanced Virtual Economy Applications: Project Final Report. Espoo: Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.