The Dark Side of Mobile App Adoption: Examining the Impact on Customers’ Multichannel Purchase
研究发现酒店集团移动应用的采纳反而降低了顾客总体消费，因为顾客可能同时使用竞争对手应用进行比价，导致对原酒店集团的消费份额下降。
Firms use mobile applications to engage with customers, provide services, and encourage customer purchase. Conventional wisdom and previous research indicate that apps have a positive effect on customer spending. The authors critically examine this premise in a highly competitive institutional context by estimating how customers’ multichannel spending changes after adopting a hotel group’s app and identifying the factors contributing to such change. Exploiting the variation in customers’ timing of app adoption and using a difference-in-differences approach, the authors find that the effect of app adoption on customers’ overall spending is significant and negative. Additional analyses suggest the possibility that customers who adopt the focal app also adopt competitor apps and therefore search more and shop around, leading to decreased share of wallet with the focal hotel group. The authors also find that the negative effect on spending is smaller for customers who use the app for mobile check-in service than those who use the app for only searching, highlighting the role of app engagement in mitigating the negative effect.