EXPRESS: The Impact of App Crashes on Consumer Engagement

Abstract

The authors develop and test a theoretical framework to examine the impact of app crashes on app engagement. The framework predicts that consumers increase engagement after encountering a single crash due to their need-for-closure and curiosity, yet reduce engagement after experiencing repeated and concentrated crashes, primarily because of frustration and perceived task unattainability; the recency of crashes moderates these effects. Field data analysis reveals that while a crash truncates a session and reduces content consumption, it increases page views in the following session. However, this increase in page views does not compensate for the loss during the crashed session. Frequent and more concentrated crashes curtail engagement. Three experiments in which crashes are exogenously manipulated in a different context support the validity and generalizability of these findings, confirm the proposed mediators, and demonstrate how to lessen the negative impact of repeated crashes with post-crash messages. The research adds new dimensions to the task pursuit literature and provides managers with a framework to quantify the economic impact of crashes, analyze content substitution behavior, and assess the bias of a transactional view of crash incidents. Additionally, it offers insights into targeted feature release to more tolerant users and strategic design of post-crash messages.