Do Top Social Apps Effect Voice Call? Evidence from Propensity Score Matching Methods

Abstract

The various mobile social APPs greatly enrich the way people communicate with each other. It has been argued that the use of mobile social APPs may influence user mobile phone call behaviour, as more and more people are used to using mobile social APPs for voice or video calls. Although mobile social APPs has penetrated into every aspect of our daily lives, so far there is no convincing research showing how the mobile social APPs influence the use of traditional mobile phone calls. Based on the potential outcomes model, we use the potential outcomes model to study the causal effects of the frequent use of mobile social APPs on mobile phone calls. The propensity score matching method is performed for bias adjustment. Moreover, the sensitivity analysis is conducted to test whether the results remained robust in the presence of hidden biases. The results suggest statistically significant positive effects of frequent use of Wechat on traditional mobile phone calls. But for QQ, we found that frequent use of QQ reduces mobile phone calls. The conclusion provides a new theoretical feature for business package recommendation, namely, the frequency of mobile social APPs. For WeChat users who use WeChat frequently, they are more inclined to provide business package containing high call duration, and for QQ users who use QQ frequently, they are more inclined to provide business package containing low call duration, which further enriches the method of business package recommendation.