手机应用市场中的溢出效应和免费增值策略

Yiting Deng, Anja Lambrecht, Yongdong Liu
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引用次数: 19

摘要

“免费增值”(Freemium)是指免费提供基本服务,但消费者需要付费使用更高级的功能。这种模式已经成为数字产品销售企业的热门商业模式。然而,目前尚不清楚免费版本的推出是否有助于或损害现有付费版本的需求。免费版本可能会让消费者在做出购买决定之前先试用产品,从而增加对付费版本的需求,但它也可能会蚕食付费版本的需求。我们使用苹果App Store游戏应用的综合数据集,追踪每款应用付费和免费版本的每日发布情况,以确定免费增值策略是否会刺激或损害现有付费版本的需求。由于苹果在应用发布前会对应用进行审查和批准,并考虑到应用级别产品的异质性,应用开发者无法预测免费版应用的确切发布日期,因此我们在差异中差异框架下对同一应用的免费版和付费版之间的溢出效应进行了估算。我们发现,免费版本的发布增加了同一款应用的付费版本的需求。在主规范下,如果免费版本发布前的每日评级数量是平均值,那么其他条件相同,免费版本的发布导致每日评级数量增加8.9%。然后,我们描述了多个鲁棒性检查。最后,我们提出证据表明,这一结果是由消费者试用免费版本和增强应用曝光驱动的,并探讨了这两种机制的相对重要性。这篇论文被市场营销学的Matthew Shum接受。补充材料:数据文件和在线附录可在https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4619上获得。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
Spillover Effects and Freemium Strategy in the Mobile App Market
“Freemium,” whereby a basic service level is provided free of charge but consumers are charged for more advanced features, has become a popular business model for firms selling digital goods. However, it is not clear whether the launch of a free version helps or hurts the demand of an existing paid version. The free version may allow consumers to sample the product before making a purchase decision and subsequently increase demand of the paid version, but it may also cannibalize demand of the paid version. We use a comprehensive data set on game apps from Apple’s App Store that tracks the launch of both the paid and the free versions of individual apps on a daily level to identify whether a freemium strategy stimulates or hurts demand of an existing paid version. We estimate the spillover effects between the free version and the paid version of the same app under a difference-in-difference framework, relying on the fact that app developers cannot predict the exact launch date of the free version of the app due to Apple’s review and approval of apps prior to release and accounting for app-level product heterogeneity. We find that the launch of a free version increases demand of the paid version of the same app. Under the main specification, if the daily number of ratings before the free version’s launch is at the mean, then all else equal, the launch of the free version leads to an 8.9% increase in the daily number of ratings. We then describe multiple robustness checks. Finally, we present evidence that the results are driven by consumers sampling the free version as well as enhanced app discovery and explore the relative importance of the two mechanisms. This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4619 .
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