ABSTRACT

As the number of apps in mobile application markets soars, platforms make significant promotion efforts to help new apps stand out. Some app developers adopt a sequential launch strategy with which they postpone launching the app in other platforms to be eligible for free promotion on the first-launch platform. We model an app developer that considers two platforms. Our results show that for the sequential launch strategy, the developer’s optimal pricing decisions rely on the switching costs to motivate users to adopt different purchase options. Surprisingly, if the switching costs are extremely high, the price on the second launch platform could exceed that on the first launch platform. In addition, we compare the sequential and simultaneous launch strategies and find that switching costs always play a vital role in developers’ launch decisions even when no user switches. Furthermore, developers may prefer the sequential strategy when the app quality is low due to low quality decay. Besides, we extend our model to a situation in which the app is free of charge. While this study focuses on the app market, our results can also be applied to game or video markets where similar phenomena exist.

摘要

随着移动应用市场的应用数量激增，平台大力推广以帮助新应用脱颖而出。一些应用程序开发者采用顺序发布策略，他们推迟在其他平台上发布应用程序，以便有资格在首发平台上免费推广。我们为考虑两个平台的应用程序开发人员建模。我们的研究结果表明，对于顺序发布策略，开发者的最优定价决策依赖于转换成本来激励用户采用不同的购买选项。令人惊讶的是，如果转换成本极高，第二个发射平台的价格可能会超过第一个发射平台的价格。此外，我们比较了顺序启动策略和同时启动策略，发现即使没有用户切换，切换成本在开发人员的发布决策中始终起着至关重要的作用。此外，由于低质量衰减，当应用程序质量低时，开发人员可能更喜欢顺序策略。此外，我们将模型扩展到应用程序免费的情况。虽然本研究侧重于应用市场，但我们的结果也可以应用于存在类似现象的游戏或视频市场。