earticle

영어

Thanks to the explosive growth of smartphone and mobile application market, there is a growing trend in mobile application downloads from application stores. In consumer behavior research, electronic WOM (eWOM) has been acknowledged as a major source of information in consumer’s decision-making process. Along with the impact of eWOM on sales, earlier research examined that customers’ involvement can be a moderating factor in searching and evaluating eWOM. Comparing internal and external eWOM, we conducted an empirical research to identify the effect of eWOM on downloading mobile applications with actual data. Furthermore, we examined how consumer’s involvement affects mobile application downloads, comparing consumer behaviors of free and paid application downloads. We found that internal and external eWOM affect overall mobile application downloads, while customers who want to purchase paid application make extensive search effort to get further information.