多面向網路效應與競爭: Google Play上的應用軟體經濟研究

Abstract

The advent of the Internet and mobile phones has raised considerable interest in business models and in platform strategy in particular. Despite the importance of platform economics in our lives, and despite abundant research on the theory of platforms, we still lack sufficient empirical evidence to verify the conclusions drawn from theoretical research. This thesis intends to fill this gap by studying the competition and behavior of application software (apps) on the Android platform. We empirically examine how the revenue model (paid, free, or freemium) adopted for a given app affects app performance as measured by the app’s daily data. We also study the impact of in-app purchases on this measure of performance. Moreover, we study how these characteristics are contingent upon both where the app is marketed and the type of category to which the app belongs. We test our hypotheses using a large sample of top grossing apps from Google Play. Our findings reveal that there is a positive relationship between reviews of the firm and downloads of the firm’s apps. In Google Play, no significant differences between paid and free revenue models emerge, whereas the freemium model is shown to be less effective than even the free model. Moreover, while reviews by users are shown to positively influence app revenue performance on the app platform, performance differs across categories. The category is also shown to influence the effects of the revenue model and in-app purchases on the app’s performance. Finally, we extend the dynamic competition of apps in the same category to reveal the competition strategy from app-level both firm-level perspectives. In addition to presenting the findings of this thesis (such as network externality, economic production scale and tipping point), we attempt to lucidate the managerial implementation of competition strategies (such as pricing strategy, winner takes all, multihoming, and envelopment) as a whole.