An Empirical Analysis of In-app Purchase Behavior in Mobile Games

The mobile game industry has become the one of the fastest growing industries with its astonishing market size. Despite its industrial importance, a few studies empirically considered actual purchasing behavior in mobile games rather than the intention to purchase. Therefore, this paper investigates the key drivers of in-app purchase by analyzing the game-log dataset provided from a mobile game company in Korea. Specifically, the effects of goal-directed, habitual and social-interacted playing behavior are analyzed on in-app purchase. Furthermore, the recursive relationship with playing and purchasing behaviorsis also considered. The result shows that all suggested factors have positive impacts on in-app purchase in the current period. In addition, the effect of previous habitual playing has a positive impact, but the effect of social-interacted playing and in-app purchase in the previous period have negative impacts on in-app purchase of the current period. These findings can improve our understanding of the impact of game playing on in-app purchase in mobile games, and provide meaningful insights for researchers and practitioners.