A Paradigmatic Analysis of Digital Application Marketplaces

This paper offers a paradigmatic analysis of digital application marketplaces for advancing information systems (IS) research on digital platforms and ecosystems. We refer to the notion of digital application marketplace, colloquially called “appstores,” as a platform component that offers a venue for exchanging applications between developers and end-users belonging to a single or multiple ecosystems. Such marketplaces exhibit diversity in features and assumptions, and we propose that examining this diversity, and its ideal types, will help us to further understand the relationship between application marketplaces, platforms, and platform ecosystems. To this end, we generate a typology that distinguishes four kinds of digital application marketplaces: closed, censored, focused, and open marketplaces. The paper also offers implications for actors wishing to make informed decisions about their relationship to a particular digital application marketplace

FIRMS? MARKETING STRATEGIES AND CONSUMER RESPONSES IN PLATFORM-BASED E-COMMERCE MARKETS

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Estimating Demand for Applications in the New Mobile Economy

A fundamental change brought forth by the advent of the mobile internet has been the widespread adoption of mobile applications. We build a builds a structural model of user demand for mobile apps and jointly estimate it with supply-side equations. We use a panel dataset consisting of apps’ sales, prices, and characteristics from Apple App Store and Google Play for 4 months in the South Korean market. Our results show demand increases with the file size, app age, description length, and number of screenshots. In the supply-side file size and app age are major cost component in app development and there exist significant returns to scale in app development. Counterfactual experiments show the effects of price discounts increase non-linearly and strong substitution effects between game apps and other apps such as utility and education apps. We find the apps in both app stores enhanced consumer surplus by approximately $158 million