What is the Spillover Effect of Punishments on App Store? A Mechanism Research From Apple App Store

The increasing unethical behaviors in the application market make platform governance increasingly important. To our knowledge, in this article, the effectiveness of punishments for unethical behaviors and the responses of app developers and users to the implementation of punishments have remained unclear. So, the purpose of this article is to examine the spillover effect and the mechanism of platform governance of Apple app store. Based on the weekly observation of 2500 apps, we examine the spillover effect of punishments of different severity on previously unpunished developers’ adaptive reaction (e.g., weekly updates and weekly new release) and users’ evaluation. We verify that punishment has effects on the developer's adaptive behaviors in the long term but does not have effects in the short term. However, severe punishments cause developers to conduct adaptive behaviors that are not conducive to the app store. Furthermore, we accentuate that the effect of different punishments on user evaluation depends on the type of apps (i.e., utilitarian versus hedonic). We also discuss the implications of our results as they directly relate to the governance of the app platform and the benefits of users and developers. More broadly, the findings contribute to building a healthy app store ecosystem composed of platforms, developers, and users.