The Implications of Offering Free Versions for the Performance of Paid Mobile Apps
研究了提供免费版本对付费移动应用采用速度的影响，发现免费版本的存在与付费应用采用速度负相关，且这种负相关在享乐型应用和应用生命周期后期更强。
The mobile application (app) industry has grown tremendously over the past ten years, primarily fueled by small app development businesses. Lacking advertising budgets, these small and relatively unknown businesses often offer free versions of their paid apps to be noticed in the crowded app industry and to reduce customer uncertainty about app quality and fit. The authors build on the existing marketing and information systems literature on sampling and versioning to investigate the implications of offering free versions for the adoption speed of paid apps. Using a unique data set of 7.7 million observations from 12,315 paid apps, and accounting for endogeneity, the authors find that although the practice of offering free versions of paid apps is popular, it is negatively associated with paid app adoption speed. They also find that this negative association between free version presence and paid app adoption speed is stronger both for hedonic apps and in the later life stages of paid apps. The authors hope that the study's results will encourage app developers to reevaluate their current strategy of offering free versions of paid apps and prompt academics to produce more work focusing on this industry.