TY - JOUR
T1 - The spillover of spotlight
T2 - Platform recommendation in the mobile app market
AU - Liang, Chen
AU - Shi, Zhan
AU - Raghu, T. S.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors thank the senior editor for his guidance and support and thank the associate editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. The authors also thank the participants at the 15th Workshop on e-Business, the 2017 ASU IS Workshop, and the 2017 Winter Conference on Business Intelligence for their helpful suggestions.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2019 INFORMS
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Many e-commerce platforms offer editor-curated recommendations to help consumers overcome the difficulty of discovering and evaluating new products. Whereas it is well recognized that the spotlight generated by editor recommendations has a positive effect on the sales of featured products, there is much less understanding in the literature on whether the spotlight influences the sales of other products that are not featured but are related to the featured products and how this externality varies depending on the specific relationship between the featured and nonfeatured products. By leveraging a novel data set collected from the mobile app market, this paper systematically investigates the spillover effect of platform-provided editor recommendations on three groups of related apps: apps by the same developer, apps with similar functionality, and the same apps marketed on a different platform. We distinguish the two mechanisms that potentially drive the externality: exposure spillover and quality endorsement spillover. We find that the overall spillover effect is positive for all three groups, but the underlying mechanisms are different. For the apps by the same developer and the same apps on a different platform, we find a significantly positive spillover of exposure, but the spillover of quality endorsement is weaker across platforms than within the same platform; for the functionally similar apps, the evidence on spillover of exposure is weaker than that for the other two groups, and the spillover of quality endorsement is statistically insignificant. In addition, we also find that the strength of the spillover effect depends on the salient characteristics of the featured apps such as price and user rating.
AB - Many e-commerce platforms offer editor-curated recommendations to help consumers overcome the difficulty of discovering and evaluating new products. Whereas it is well recognized that the spotlight generated by editor recommendations has a positive effect on the sales of featured products, there is much less understanding in the literature on whether the spotlight influences the sales of other products that are not featured but are related to the featured products and how this externality varies depending on the specific relationship between the featured and nonfeatured products. By leveraging a novel data set collected from the mobile app market, this paper systematically investigates the spillover effect of platform-provided editor recommendations on three groups of related apps: apps by the same developer, apps with similar functionality, and the same apps marketed on a different platform. We distinguish the two mechanisms that potentially drive the externality: exposure spillover and quality endorsement spillover. We find that the overall spillover effect is positive for all three groups, but the underlying mechanisms are different. For the apps by the same developer and the same apps on a different platform, we find a significantly positive spillover of exposure, but the spillover of quality endorsement is weaker across platforms than within the same platform; for the functionally similar apps, the evidence on spillover of exposure is weaker than that for the other two groups, and the spillover of quality endorsement is statistically insignificant. In addition, we also find that the strength of the spillover effect depends on the salient characteristics of the featured apps such as price and user rating.
KW - Mobile app market
KW - Platform recommendation
KW - Product discovery
KW - Spillover effect
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85079285814&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85079285814&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1287/isre.2019.0863
DO - 10.1287/isre.2019.0863
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85079285814
SN - 1047-7047
VL - 30
SP - 1296
EP - 1318
JO - Information Systems Research
JF - Information Systems Research
IS - 4
ER -