Love Unshackled: Identifying the Effect of Mobile App Adoption in Online Dating1
Authors: Jung, JaeHwuen; Bapna, Ravi; Ramaprasad, Jui; Umyarov, Akhmed
Journal: MIS Quarterly (2019)
<jats:p>The proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices has led to numerous companies investing significant resources in developing mobile applications, in every imaginable domain. As apps proliferate, understanding the impact of app adoption on key outcomes of interest and linking this understanding to the underlying mechanisms that drive these results is imperative. In this paper, we explore the changes in user behavior induced by adoption of a mobile application, in terms of engagement and matching outcomes in the online dating context. We also identify three mechanisms that are somewhat unique to the mobile environment, but are hitherto unestablished in the literature, that drive this shift in behavior: ubiquity, impulsivity, and disinhibition. Our main identification strategy uses propensity score matching combined with difference-indifferences, coupled with a rigorous falsification test to confirm the validity of our identification strategy. Our results demonstrate that mobile app adoption induces users to become more socially engaged as measured by key engagement metrics such as visiting significantly more profiles, sending significantly more messages, and importa…