IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/net/wpaper/1802.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Competing with Superstars in the Mobile App Market

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Ershov

    (Toulouse School of Economics, 21 Allee de Brienne, 31000 Toulouse, France)

Abstract

Firms considering to enter into online markets face significant demand uncertainty and consumer search costs, with consumers most likely finding previously successful products in the market. This leads to a trade-off for potential entrants. Consider the appearance of a new very popular product (“superstar") in a particular niche. The popular product resolves demand uncertainty but also increases search costs for new entrants relative to the superstar. The interaction between these two forces could result in too much entry by low quality products, or not enough entry. I empirically examine these effects using 2012- 2013 data on mobile games in the Android mobile app store. I show that there are large increases in entry in niches where the superstar appears, unless they were already popular niches (“discovered"). I also show that the superstar reduces the quality of the new entrants and intensifies price competition.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Ershov, 2018. "Competing with Superstars in the Mobile App Market," Working Papers 18-02, NET Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:net:wpaper:1802
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.netinst.org/Ershov_18-02.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Peter Davis, 2006. "Spatial competition in retail markets: movie theaters," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 37(4), pages 964-982, December.
    2. Lazear, Edward P & Rosen, Sherwin, 1981. "Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 89(5), pages 841-864, October.
    3. Philippe Aghion & Nick Bloom & Richard Blundell & Rachel Griffith & Peter Howitt, 2005. "Competition and Innovation: an Inverted-U Relationship," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 120(2), pages 701-728.
    4. Jennifer Brown, 2011. "Quitters Never Win: The (Adverse) Incentive Effects of Competing with Superstars," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 119(5), pages 982-1013.
    5. Benny Moldovanu & Aner Sela, 2008. "The Optimal Allocation of Prizes in Contests," Springer Books, in: Roger D. Congleton & Arye L. Hillman & Kai A. Konrad (ed.), 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking 1, pages 615-631, Springer.
    6. Kevin J. Boudreau & Karim R. Lakhani & Michael Menietti, 2016. "Performance responses to competition across skill levels in rank-order tournaments: field evidence and implications for tournament design," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 47(1), pages 140-165, February.
    7. Aghion, Philippe & Howitt, Peter, 1992. "A Model of Growth through Creative Destruction," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 60(2), pages 323-351, March.
    8. Jonathan D. Levin, 2011. "The Economics of Internet Markets," NBER Working Papers 16852, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Austan Goolsbee & Chad Syverson, 2008. "How Do Incumbents Respond to the Threat of Entry? Evidence from the Major Airlines," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 123(4), pages 1611-1633.
    10. Edward L. Glaeser, 2010. "Introduction to "Agglomeration Economics"," NBER Chapters, in: Agglomeration Economics, pages 1-14, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Edward L. Glaeser, 2010. "Agglomeration Economics," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number glae08-1.
    12. Luis Aguiar & Joel Waldfogel, 2018. "Quality Predictability and the Welfare Benefits from New Products: Evidence from the Digitization of Recorded Music," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 126(2), pages 492-524.
    13. Peter Davis, 2006. "Spatial competition in retail markets: movie theaters," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 37(4), pages 964-982, December.
    14. Green, Jerry R & Stokey, Nancy L, 1983. "A Comparison of Tournaments and Contracts," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 91(3), pages 349-364, June.
    15. Janet S. Netz & Beck A. Taylor, 2002. "Maximum Or Minimum Differentiation? Location Patterns Of Retail Outlets," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 84(1), pages 162-175, February.
    16. Steven T. Berry & Joel Waldfogel, 1999. "Free Entry and Social Inefficiency in Radio Broadcasting," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 30(3), pages 397-420, Autumn.
    17. Kevin J. Boudreau & Nicola Lacetera & Karim R. Lakhani, 2011. "Incentives and Problem Uncertainty in Innovation Contests: An Empirical Analysis," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 57(5), pages 843-863, May.
    18. Erik Brynjolfsson & Yu (Jeffrey) Hu & Michael D. Smith, 2003. "Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 49(11), pages 1580-1596, November.
    19. Glenn Ellison & Edward L. Glaeser & William R. Kerr, 2010. "What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(3), pages 1195-1213, June.
    20. N. Gregory Mankiw & Michael D. Whinston, 1986. "Free Entry and Social Inefficiency," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 17(1), pages 48-58, Spring.
    21. Bresnahan, Timothy F & Reiss, Peter C, 1991. "Entry and Competition in Concentrated Markets," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 99(5), pages 977-1009, October.
    22. Athey, Susan & Imbens, Guido W., 2015. "Machine Learning for Estimating Heterogeneous Causal Effects," Research Papers 3350, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    23. Manuel Arellano & Stephen Bond, 1991. "Some Tests of Specification for Panel Data: Monte Carlo Evidence and an Application to Employment Equations," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 58(2), pages 277-297.
    24. Rosen, Sherwin, 1981. "The Economics of Superstars," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(5), pages 845-858, December.
    25. Katja Seim, 2006. "An empirical model of firm entry with endogenous product‐type choices," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 37(3), pages 619-640, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Natalia Fabra & Juan-Pablo Montero, 2022. "Product Lines and Price Discrimination in Markets with Information Frictions," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(2), pages 981-1001, February.
    2. Han Yuan, 2020. "Competing for Time: A Study of Mobile Applications," 2020 Papers pyu309, Job Market Papers.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. An-Hsiang Liu & Ralph Siebert, 2020. "The Competitive Effects of Declining Entry Costs over Time: Evidence from the Static Random Access Memory Market," CESifo Working Paper Series 8552, CESifo.
    2. Liu, An-Hsiang & Siebert, Ralph B., 2022. "The competitive effects of declining entry costs over time: Evidence from the static random access memory market," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).
    3. Katja Seim & Joel Waldfogel, 2013. "Public Monopoly and Economic Efficiency: Evidence from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board's Entry Decisions," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(2), pages 831-862, April.
    4. Victor Aguirregabiria & Margaret Slade, 2017. "Empirical models of firms and industries," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 50(5), pages 1445-1488, December.
    5. Vivek Bhattacharya, 2021. "An Empirical Model of R&D Procurement Contests: An Analysis of the DOD SBIR Program," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 89(5), pages 2189-2224, September.
    6. Pavel Kireyev, 2016. "Markets for Ideas: Prize Structure, Entry Limits, and the Design of Ideation Contests," Harvard Business School Working Papers 16-129, Harvard Business School.
    7. T. Gries & R. Grundmann & I. Palnau & M. Redlin, 2017. "Innovations, growth and participation in advanced economies - a review of major concepts and findings," International Economics and Economic Policy, Springer, vol. 14(2), pages 293-351, April.
    8. Mitsukuni Nishida, 2015. "Estimating a Model of Strategic Network Choice: The Convenience-Store Industry in Okinawa," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 34(1), pages 20-38, January.
    9. Hackl, Franz & Kummer, Michael E. & Winter-Ebmer, Rudolf & Zulehner, Christine, 2014. "Market structure and market performance in E-commerce," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 199-218.
    10. Daniel P. Gross, 2020. "Creativity Under Fire: The Effects of Competition on Creative Production," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 102(3), pages 583-599, July.
    11. Catherine Schaumans & Frank Verboven, 2015. "Entry and Competition in Differentiated Products Markets," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 97(1), pages 195-209, March.
    12. Llorente-Saguer, Aniol & Sheremeta, Roman M. & Szech, Nora, 2023. "Designing contests between heterogeneous contestants: An experimental study of tie-breaks and bid-caps in all-pay auctions," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    13. Michael Babington & Sebastian J. Goerg & Carl Kitchens, 2020. "Do Tournaments With Superstars Encourage or Discourage Competition?," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 21(1), pages 44-63, January.
    14. Tedi Skiti, 2017. "Entry Barriers and Technological Innovation in Broadband," Working Papers 17-11, NET Institute.
    15. Mario Lackner, 2016. "Teams as Superstars: Effort and Risk Taking in Rank-Order Tournaments for Women and Men," Economics working papers 2016-13, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    16. Linnemer, Laurent & Visser, Michael, 2016. "Self-selection in tournaments: The case of chess players," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 126(PA), pages 213-234.
    17. Llorente-Saguer, Aniol & Sheremeta, Roman & Szech, Nora, 2016. "Designing Contests Between Heterogeneous Contestants: An Experimental Study of Tie-Breaks and Bid-Caps in All-Pay Auctions," MPRA Paper 71202, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    18. Drugov, Mikhail & Ryvkin, Dmitry, 2020. "Tournament rewards and heavy tails," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 190(C).
    19. Bilen, Eren & Matros, Alexander, 2023. "The Queen's Gambit: Explaining the superstar effect using evidence from chess," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 215(C), pages 307-324.
    20. Bastani, Spencer & Giebe, Thomas & Gürtler, Oliver, 2022. "Simple equilibria in general contests," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 264-280.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    mobile apps; entry; superstars; demand discovery; search;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L86 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Information and Internet Services; Computer Software
    • D22 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:net:wpaper:1802. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Nicholas Economides (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.NETinst.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.