The effects of network externalities and herding on user satisfaction with mobile social apps

1.IntroductionMobile users are reaching a mass audience due to the fast development of Internet and mobile technologies. Mobile applications, commonly referred to as mobile apps, are programs that run on mobile devices and perform functions ranging from web browsing to social networking [Taylor & Strutton 2010]. Compared to traditional Internet services, mobile apps have many advantages such as ubiquity, convenience and immediacy, which enable users to interact with their friends anytime and anywhere [Wei & Lu 2014]. Mobile social apps, designed to support social networking, have experienced a rapid expansion in terms of number of users among all types of mobile apps [Wei 2008]. Social networking services provide information sharing and networking opportunities as well as a new way for acquiring news [Newman, 2016]. The number of social networking users is expected to reach 2.5 billion, a third of earth's entire population, in 2018 1. Among all social networking platforms, Facebook is the undeniable leader in terms of number of monthly active users (1.6 billion around the world), followed by WeChat (excluding instant messenger apps such as WhatsApp and QQ) 2. As of January 2016, about 52 percent of users in North America accessed social networking services via mobile apps, while the global social app user percentage was 27 percent. Those numbers are expected to continue to increase in the coming years.As social networking services and mobile devices have become increasingly popular, there is a strong research need to understand user satisfaction with mobile social apps and user retention against competitor apps. Compared to traditional products or services, mobile apps have a low switching cost because a user can easily switch from one mobile app to another with just a few touches. For mobile social apps, the consequence of user dissatisfaction and losing a user is critical. Satisfied users are more likely to continue using the product or service and distribute positive word-of-mouth [Kondo et al. 2012]. Existing studies focus on either social networking services, such as Facebook [Lin et al. 2014; Baneijee & Dey 2013], Twitter [Johnson & Yang 2009], mobile technologies [Kim et al. 2013], and Microblog [Zhao & Lu 2012], or mobile applications in general (e.g., Nayebi et al. 2012). Mobile social apps, which combine both a social network platform and mobile experience, become increasingly popular due to the wide adoption of mobile devices. However, very few studies have examined the factors influencing user satisfaction with mobile social apps. Chang [2015] empirically shows that perceived value, such as emotional, social, price, and performance/quality value, has a positive effect on user satisfaction and loyalty with mobile apps. The antecedent measures a user's perceived value without considering the influence of others, which is highly likely in mobile social apps. Hsiao et al. [2016] find that social ties, along with utilitarian and hedonic factors, have strong influence over users' satisfaction with mobile social apps. However, it fails to explain why social ties can influence user satisfaction. Those studies find the antecedents of user satisfaction with mobile apps, but fail to recognize the peer influence in the social networking context. In this study, we aim to examine the impact of social influence on user satisfaction with mobile social apps. Network externalities and herd behavior are considered as the two major social factors that may affect user satisfaction. We build an integral research model by drawing on the theories of network externalities and herd behavior, which explain the extrinsic factors influencing mobile social app users' satisfaction.The rest of this paper is structured as follows. In the next section, we describe existing work related to our research. In Section 3, we present our research model and develop research hypotheses. In Section 4, we introduce the methodology and operationalization of our empirical study, followed by a discussion of the empirical results. …