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ABSTRACT
Informational cascades are theorized as an underlying mechanism of herding. That is, an individual, having observed the actions of those ahead of him/her, chooses to follow the behavior of the preceding individuals even though his/her private information suggests other options. Empirical identification of informational cascades is challenging because individual users’ private information is unobservable. Our study utilizes a unique data set on post-adoption discontinuance of app usage to revisit herding and informational cascades in software adoption. We find that with the download of apps being controlled, a higher software ranking is associated with more post-adoption discontinuance of app usage, which empirically illustrates the decision deficiency of following others’ observed behavior in adopting popular software apps and supports the theoretical perspective of informational cascades. We further show that the association between app ranking and post-adoption discontinuance is stronger for apps with higher ratings and with higher complexity levels. Moreover, as apps become more complex in the app life cycle, updated app versions with a higher level of complexity are associated with a weaker relationship between app ranking and post-adoption discontinuance. Our study contributes to the literature by confirming the informational cascades effect and its interaction with other informational mechanisms (e.g., user rating) and software internal feature (e.g., product complexity) in software adoption. The findings help software vendors gain insights in users’ herding behavior in software adoption and optimize their software releasing strategies and promotional effort allocation.
Notes
2. Each function is a JavaScript procedure which includes a set of statements that performs a task or calculates a value.
3. Discontinuance, Complexity, Download are highly skewed. Therefore, log values of these variables are used in model estimation. Variables Rank, Age, TimeInterval, and NumofApp are calculated in thousand to address the scale issue.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Xia Zhao
Xia Zhao ([email protected]; corresponding author) is an assistant professor of Management Information Systems at Terry College of Business, The University of Georgia. She received her Ph.D. degree in Management Science and Information Systems from McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include platform economy, information security, digital innovations, IT governance, social networks and social media. Dr. Zhao has published in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Production and Operations Management, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, other journals, and many conference proceedings.
Jing Tian
Jing Tian ([email protected]) is a post-doctoral researcher in the Center for Digital Innovation, Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University. She received her Ph.D. degree in Information Management and Information Systems from School of Management at Fudan University, China. Her research interests include platform governance, cross-platform competition, AI fairness and machine behavior. Her publications have appeared in Electronic Commerce Research and Applications and conference proceedings, such as those of International Conference on Information Systems and others.
Ling Xue
Ling Xue ([email protected]) is an associate professor at Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Management Science and Information Systems from McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the strategic aspects of IT, information economics in various inter-organizational and supply chain contexts, and network effects in software platforms and electronic commerce. His papers have been published in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, and the Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems, among others.