Exploring How Rivals and Complementors Affect Evolutionary Rate of B2C Apps: An Empirical Study

The hyper competition among rivals and enveloping threats from complementors are crucial external sources that influence app update strategies of B2C platforms. However, prior app-related literature largely focuses on factors affecting app performance, with scant attention on external drivers of the continuous app evolution, that is app updates. Besides, the results of app updates on market performance are mixed in extant literature. Therefore, this study is motivated to explore how competitive pressures from rivals and enveloping threats from complementors affect evolutionary rate of B2C apps and its subsequent effects on market performance. Our empirical study demonstrates that quick evolution of rival and complementor apps increases evolutionary rate of B2C apps. In contrast, a greater number of better performed rival and complementor apps decreases the evolutionary rate. Furthermore, we unveiled an inverted U-shaped relationship between evolutionary rate of B2C apps and market performance. The theoretical implications are also discussed

The Study of Typology of Competitive Actions in Digital Environment: An Empirical Investigation of Mobile Instant Messaging

The highly competitive and increasingly transparent characteristics of the digital environment have led inter-firm rivalry more frequently. Competitive actions and competitor’s responses together determine firms’ value creation. The key to obtain competitive advantages is to stop or delay competitor’s response. Therefore, our research question is which type of actions is the most effective in digital environment. Grounded in the framework of explorative/exploitative in the organizational learning literature, we organize competitive actions from two dimensions: resources based (strategic versus tactical) and innovation based (innovative versus efficient). This paper studies the competitive actions in mobile instant messaging industry and use structured content analysis to capture firms’ competitive actions. Finally, 113 matched competitive actions and responses were collected. Then, we compare the effects of different types of competitive actions from three aspects, that is the number of responses, response time and response quality. The results show that innovative-strategic action is the most effective action in digital environment. Our action-level study of MIM (mobile instant messaging) promotes better understanding of how firms interact with each other in digital environment. Moreover, the new typology of competitive action helps us identify competitive actions in digital environment more precisely and help managers to better understand industry dynamics thus developing appropriate strategies to compete in the industry

Implications of Rewards and Punishments for Content Generations by Key Opinion Leaders

Nowadays, e-commerce platforms have increasingly relied on contents generated by key opinion leaders to engage customers and drive product sales. To stay on top of the growth, e-commerce content platforms have introduced rewards and punishments policies to ensure content quality. However, effectiveness has remained less clear. Besides, there is a dearth of research that focuses on such performance-based output control in the extant platform governance and user-generated content (UGC) literature. In this study, based on the reinforcement theory and UGC literature, we investigate the effects of monetary rewards and punishments on the quantity and quality of contents generated by KOLs in the e-commerce content platform context. Using data collected from JD WeChat Shopping Circle, we empirically testified our hypotheses. Our results indicate that punishments significantly increase the quantity and quality of content generated by KOLs. Monetary rewards only have significantly positive effects on the quality of KOLs\u27 generated content. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the effects of monetary rewards is larger compared with that of punishments. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed