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Paper Number

2083

Paper Type

Complete

Description

Commission is a common platform pricing strategy for charging a portion of transaction revenues. However, digital platform firms face long-standing disputes with app developers and even lawsuits regarding their commission rules. This study investigates how reducing platform commission affects mobile app performance and developers’ behaviors. We leverage a natural experiment based on a commission policy change implemented by Apple and conduct a difference-in-differences (DID) analysis. Surprisingly, we find a negative impact of commission reduction on app performance measured by daily active users and downloads. The impact of commission reduction on app performance is heterogeneous across apps with different ranks and across apps in the game and non-game app categories. Further analysis of the mechanism reveals that the apps eligible to enjoy the benefits of commission reduction are updated less frequently, indicating that developers devote less effort to improving and advancing these apps. Our findings provide important theoretical and managerial implications.

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Dec 12th, 12:00 AM

Platform Commission Reduction And Mobile App Performance

Commission is a common platform pricing strategy for charging a portion of transaction revenues. However, digital platform firms face long-standing disputes with app developers and even lawsuits regarding their commission rules. This study investigates how reducing platform commission affects mobile app performance and developers’ behaviors. We leverage a natural experiment based on a commission policy change implemented by Apple and conduct a difference-in-differences (DID) analysis. Surprisingly, we find a negative impact of commission reduction on app performance measured by daily active users and downloads. The impact of commission reduction on app performance is heterogeneous across apps with different ranks and across apps in the game and non-game app categories. Further analysis of the mechanism reveals that the apps eligible to enjoy the benefits of commission reduction are updated less frequently, indicating that developers devote less effort to improving and advancing these apps. Our findings provide important theoretical and managerial implications.

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