Title: How do network externalities affect customers' adoption intention in mobile app store: from a perception of consumer perceived value

Authors: Ting Zhu; Yaobin Lu; Sumeet Gupta

Addresses: School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China ' School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China ' Department of Operations and Systems, Indian Institute of Management, Raipur, 492001, India

Abstract: Faced with the fiercely competitive mobile apps market in China, many mobile app store managers developed their own communities to improve the users' adoption and retention. Those communities help make consumers a sense of the amount of users in mobile app stores and expand the complementarity of mobile app stores. Thus, in this study, we examine how network externality affects customers' intention to adopt app store using the concept of perceived value. Based on the theoretical frame of customer perceived value (CPV), we present a research model that integrates network externalities to adoption intention. The results of this study indicate that network externality has a positive and highly significant effect on CPV, which in turn affects people's intention to adopt. However, perceived price structure describing the financial value does not have a significant influence on adoption intention. Implications for theory and practice are presented.

Keywords: network externality; perceived value; multi-dimensional value; adoption intention.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMC.2018.094358

International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2018 Vol.16 No.5, pp.493 - 512

Received: 27 Jun 2016
Accepted: 14 Jun 2017
Published online: 30 Aug 2018 *

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