The positive spillover effect of mobile social games on app literacy

Abstract

Despite the massive influx of mobile apps into the market, not everyone is «mobile literate.» The steady growth of the mobile industry has highlighted the emerging need to advance mobile literacy. This study uses an individual level mobile app usage dataset to examine the potential of mobile platform-based social games as training tools for mobile literacy. We choose Anipang, a popular mobile social game app, as a stimulus in an experiment based on a difference-in-differences framework. We classify app users into two groups on the basis of consumption intensity and then analyze the changes in consumption of apps excluding Anipang before and after Anipang adoption. Results reveal that high Anipang consumption increases the duration of app usage and the number of apps used but that such increase is statistically significant only for the latter. These spillover effects are more pronounced among users with limited mobile experiences or are in their 50s or older. These findings suggest that mobile gaming apps are an attractive means of reaching technologically marginalized cohorts.