Impact of online consumer ratings on mobile app demand

Abstract

People can now freely interact online in order to gather and share information about products and services. Consequently, it becomes very important for firms to understand how these developments shape demand. Online consumer ratings are an evaluative, numerical form of eWOM that reduces the information asymmetry for current and potential customers on the Internet and is thus expected to impact sales. Because of this, several studies have investigated their effect on demand since it is still not clear the extent to which their valence, volume and/or dispersion affect product sales. This dissertation studies the impact of online consumer ratings on demand by determining the effects of valence and volume of mobile apps ratings on sales at two online stores, in the last trimester of 2015. Additionally, it also investigates the potentially moderating effects of apps characteristics, namely perceived hedonicity, thereby making a novel contribution to the topic. Consequently, 360 surveys were collected to assess numerically the apps’ perceived hedonicity. Furthermore, ratings and publicly available data of 250 apps was collected from Google Play and Amazon App Store to be evaluated in a regression analysis. The results show that the volume is what matter on apps’ demand since the average rating was not significant in the regressions. Therefore, firms should focus on increasing the number of ratings regardless of the valence. Still, the hedonic/utilitarian concept is a moderator for the average rating and the volume, thus the more hedonic the app the fewer will be impact of both variables on sales.

Date of Award	12 May 2016
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Ana Isabel de Almeida Costa (Supervisor)