If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It: How Incorporating User Feedback in Product Development Affects Mobile Application Ratings 

Zeynep Aydın will be giving a seminar this week in the Department of International Trade research seminar series. She is expecting to complete her PhD in Marketing in Fall 2020 at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. She has a BSc in Statistics from METU and MS in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University. Her research interests include topics such as Mobile Marketing, Mobile Applications, Digital Marketing, Online Word of Mouth, User Generated Content, Gamification and methodological interests include topics such as Diffusion Models, Bayesian Modeling, Time Series Models, Dynamic Linear Models, Natural Language Processing, Sentiment Analysis and Machine Learning. 
Her paper is titled "If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It: How Incorporating User Feedback in Product Development Affects Mobile Application Ratings."

ABSTRACT
When does listening to your customer's voice pay off? Based on an automated text analysis of about 1M reviews and a content analysis of about 3K mobile application updates, observed over 460 apps' first year on the market, this paper seeks to shed light on the impact of incorporating feedback extracted from user reviews in the development of successivegenerations of mobile apps on user ratings. The results reveal that the rewards associated with responding to user requests and the penalties due to ignoring these requests can be substantial and depend on the topic of the feedback and the timing of the response. Our findings provide app developers guidance on the challenge of prioritizing possible development paths: (1) promptly releasing updates in response to users' requests that provide additional benefits or ensure essential functioning of the app to restore and improve ratings; (2) continuously releasing updates that improve existing benefits or ensure compatibility with most recent operating systems and wide range of devices to avoid penalties. The implications may also extend to the broader New Product Development literature especially with respect to the fundamental question of whether and when to pro-act on or re-act to the voice of the customer.

https://boun-edu-tr.zoom.us/j/6486881318?pwd=RjQ3Z2xOanVzRXcvWjFDbkJJV2taZz09 
Meeting ID: 648 688 1318 
Passcode: 682711