Veranstaltungsprogramm der VHB Jahrestagung

Digital platforms, now ubiquitous intermediaries in the modern economy, claim to uphold governance rules aimed at ensuring a level playing field for their participants. However, there is limited research exploring the extent to which these platforms fulfill this objective. Furthermore, the antecedents and consequences of any non-compliance remain largely unexamined. This paper addresses this research gap by examining the mobile app market. The study analyzes 852 apps available on both Apple and Google platforms across nineteen countries. It assesses these apps' disclosed versus actual behavior concerning device ID transfer for advertising purposes, aiming to pinpoint instances of non-compliance. The findings reveal that about 21% of the apps do not comply. Compliance rates are higher among apps catering to Apple users compared to those for Google users, with negligible variations across countries. Notably, older apps, presumably with more experience, demonstrate greater compliance. However, factors like popularity and reputation do not significantly affect compliance levels. Intriguingly, non-compliant apps earn at least 10% more in advertising revenue than they would if compliant, thus gaining a significant economic edge.

A key driver of academic impact is reach: highly visible research and researchers have a higher potential to impact society, managers, and fellow academics. Social media (SM), especially Twitter (or, now, X), is becoming an increasingly important tool within the scientific community for promoting oneself and one’s publications. With its help, academics can boost their visibility and their publications’ reach. Still, a detailed understanding of academics’ SM activities, its efficacy to drive reach, and its success factors are lacking. Therefore, this paper identifies drivers of engagement with academics’ SM activities using a difference-in-difference approach to uncover how SM engagement affects reach in terms of citations. Specifically, the authors observe more than 386,818 tweets by 585 academics over six years and analyse the who, what, how, and when of their posts. The insights inform academics on how to more effectively engage their SM audience, promote their research, and boost their reach.

Online word-of-mouth (WOM) is a critical driver of consumer purchases, yet relatively little work has sought to understand how characteristics of a company might impact aggregate WOM valence (e.g., average star rating of online reviews). In the current work, the authors examine the effects of one such attribute, company size. The relationship between company size and aggregate WOM valence reflects not only the quality of consumers’ experiences with a company but also individuals’ decisions of whether to engage in WOM. The authors analyze more than four million instances of WOM about hundreds of companies and find a negative relationship between company size and WOM that persists when controlling for the quality of consumers’ experience with the company. The effect occurs across a range of product categories for both online reviews and social media posts. Subsequent experiments show that the effect occurs because consumers are more likely to engage in WOM about a larger (smaller) company following a low-quality (high-quality) experience. Theoretically based on the Stereotype Content model, A mediation analysis shows that for high-quality experiences, consumers perceive smaller companies as higher in warmth. For low-quality experiences, consumers perceive larger companies as more competent than smaller companies. Both warmth and competence then explain a higher likelihood to share the experience. Finally, the authors show that being responsive online (e.g., answering on WOM posts from consumers) can help larger companies mitigate the negative impact of size on WOM valence. Based on the proposed theory, an experiment shows that being responsive online increases warmth of larger and competence of smaller companies. The findings imply that large companies aiming to improve WOM valence might need to allocate more resources to WOM marketing and benefit from strategies that increase their perceived warmth.