The authors develop and test a theoretical framework to examine the impact of app crashes on app engagement. The framework predicts that consumers increase engagement after encountering a single crash due to their need-for-closure and curiosity, yet reduce engagement after experiencing repeated and concentrated crashes, primarily because of frustration and perceived task unattainability; the recency of crashes moderates these effects. Field data analysis reveals that while a crash truncates a session and reduces content consumption, it increases page views in the following session. However, this increase in page views does not compensate for the loss during the crashed session. Frequent and more concentrated crashes curtail engagement. Three experiments in which crashes are exogenously manipulated in a different context support the validity and generalizability of these findings, confirm the proposed mediators, and demonstrate how to lessen the negative impact of repeated crashes with post-crash messages. The research adds new dimensions to the task pursuit literature and provides managers with a framework to quantify the economic impact of crashes, analyze content substitution behavior, and assess the bias of a transactional view of crash incidents. Additionally, it offers insights into targeted feature release to more tolerant users and strategic design of post-crash messages.

中文翻译：

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EXPRESS：应用程序崩溃对消费者参与度的影响


作者开发并测试了一个理论框架，以检查应用程序崩溃对应用程序参与度的影响。该框架预测，消费者在遇到一次崩溃后，由于他们需要关闭和好奇心而提高参与度，但在经历反复和集中的崩溃后，参与度会降低，主要是因为挫败感和感知到任务无法完成;崩溃的近因性会缓和这些影响。现场数据分析显示，虽然崩溃会截断会话并减少内容消耗，但它会增加后续会话中的页面查看次数。但是，页面查看次数的增加并不能补偿会话崩溃期间的损失。频繁和更集中的碰撞会减少参与度。在不同背景下对车祸进行外生操纵的三个实验支持了这些发现的有效性和普遍性，证实了所提出的中介，并展示了如何通过车祸后信息减少反复车祸的负面影响。该研究为任务追踪文献增加了新的维度，并为管理人员提供了一个框架来量化车祸的经济影响，分析内容替代行为，并评估车祸事件交易视图的偏差。此外，它还提供了对向更宽容的用户发布目标功能以及崩溃后消息的战略设计的见解。