Does digital platform governance improve process innovation? Evidence from Apple's tracking policies

IF 4.7 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Economic Modelling Pub Date : 2025-09-07 DOI:10.1016/j.econmod.2025.107298

Wei Wu, Wei Han

{"title":"Does digital platform governance improve process innovation? Evidence from Apple's tracking policies","authors":"Wei Wu, Wei Han","doi":"10.1016/j.econmod.2025.107298","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigates whether digital platform governance improves firms' process innovation, addressing gaps in understanding how platform policies influence innovation dynamics in digital markets. Existing literature predominantly focuses on static innovation measures, failing to capture the iterative nature of digital product development cycles. Using gaming app data from iOS and Android platforms across 60 countries from 2019 to 2022, we employ a difference-in-differences approach to examine Apple's privacy policy impact on process innovation. Our analysis reveals that Apple's tracking policy significantly accelerates app update frequency, with developers increasing updates by 32.45% following policy announcement and 7 times more frequently after implementation. Cross-platform and cross-product knowledge flows moderate these effects, with advantages emerging during policy announcement but reversing during implementation phases. These findings demonstrate that appropriately designed platform governance can stimulate rather than stifle innovation through constraint-induced adaptation mechanisms, providing new insights into digital platform economics and implications for privacy policy design.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48419,"journal":{"name":"Economic Modelling","volume":"152 ","pages":"Article 107298"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7000,"publicationDate":"2025-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Economic Modelling","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264999325002937","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

This study investigates whether digital platform governance improves firms' process innovation, addressing gaps in understanding how platform policies influence innovation dynamics in digital markets. Existing literature predominantly focuses on static innovation measures, failing to capture the iterative nature of digital product development cycles. Using gaming app data from iOS and Android platforms across 60 countries from 2019 to 2022, we employ a difference-in-differences approach to examine Apple's privacy policy impact on process innovation. Our analysis reveals that Apple's tracking policy significantly accelerates app update frequency, with developers increasing updates by 32.45% following policy announcement and 7 times more frequently after implementation. Cross-platform and cross-product knowledge flows moderate these effects, with advantages emerging during policy announcement but reversing during implementation phases. These findings demonstrate that appropriately designed platform governance can stimulate rather than stifle innovation through constraint-induced adaptation mechanisms, providing new insights into digital platform economics and implications for privacy policy design.

查看原文本刊更多论文

数字平台治理能改善流程创新吗？来自苹果追踪政策的证据

本研究调查了数字平台治理是否能改善企业的流程创新，解决了在理解平台政策如何影响数字市场创新动态方面的差距。现有文献主要关注静态创新措施，未能捕捉到数字产品开发周期的迭代本质。利用2019年至2022年60个国家的iOS和Android平台的游戏应用数据，我们采用了差异中的差异方法来研究苹果隐私政策对流程创新的影响。我们的分析显示，苹果的跟踪政策显著加快了应用更新频率，在政策公布后，开发者的更新频率增加了32.45%，在政策实施后，开发者的更新频率增加了7倍。跨平台和跨产品的知识流动缓和了这些影响，优势在政策宣布期间出现，但在实施阶段逆转。这些发现表明，适当设计的平台治理可以通过约束诱导的适应机制刺激而不是抑制创新，为数字平台经济学和隐私政策设计提供了新的见解。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

Economic Modelling ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

8.00

自引率

10.60%

发文量

295

期刊介绍： Economic Modelling fills a major gap in the economics literature, providing a single source of both theoretical and applied papers on economic modelling. The journal prime objective is to provide an international review of the state-of-the-art in economic modelling. Economic Modelling publishes the complete versions of many large-scale models of industrially advanced economies which have been developed for policy analysis. Examples are the Bank of England Model and the US Federal Reserve Board Model which had hitherto been unpublished. As individual models are revised and updated, the journal publishes subsequent papers dealing with these revisions, so keeping its readers as up to date as possible.