Essays on Mobile Channel User Behavior

In two independent and thematically relevant chapters, I empirically investigate consumers’ mobile channel usage behaviors. In the first chapter, I examine the impact of mobile use in online higher education. With the prevalence of affordable mobile devices, higher education institutions anticipate that learning facilitated through mobile access can make education more accessible and effective, while some critics of mobile learning worry about the efficacy of small screens and possible distraction factors. I analyze individual-level data from Massive Open Online Courses. To resolve self-selection issues in mobile use, I exploit changes in the number of mobile-friendly, short video lectures in one course (“non-focal course”) as an instrumental variable for a learner’s mobile intensity in the other course (“focal course”), and vice versa, among learners who have taken both courses during the same semester. Results indicate that high mobile intensity impedes, or at most does not improve course engagement due mainly to mobile distractions from doing activities unrelated to learning. Finally, I discuss practical implications for researchers and higher education institutions to improve the effectiveness of mobile learning. In the second chapter, I investigate the impact of mobile users’ popular app adoption on their app usage behaviors. The adoption of popular apps can serve as a barrier to the use of other apps given popular apps’ addictive nature and users’ limited time resources, while it can stimulate the exploration of other apps by inspiring interest in experimentation with similar technologies. I use individual-level app usage data and develop a joint model of the number of apps used and app usage duration. Results indicate that popular app adoption stimulates users to explore new apps at app stores and allocate more time to them such that it increases both the number of apps used and app usage duration for apps excluding the popular app. Such positive spillover effects are heterogeneous across app categories and user characteristics. I draw insights for app developers, app platforms, and media planners by determining which new apps to release in line with the launch of popular apps, when to release such apps, and to whom distribution should be targeted.