What Piques Users’ Curiosity on Open Innovation Platforms? An Analysis Based on Mobile App Stores

Curiosity, a motivational state of exploratory behavior, is conducive to innovation diffusion by encouraging users’ exploration on open innovation platforms. Yet, despite its importance, there is a scarcity of research investigating the mechanism for piquing users’ curiosity. Accordingly, we advance a research model to unravel how platform service quality, in the form of service content quality and service delivery quality, affects users’ epistemic and perceptual curiosity via inducing their trust and distrust in a platform. Taking mobile app stores as our empirical context, we collected data from 431 users to validate our hypothesized relationships. Analytical results indicate that both dimensions of platform service quality positively influence users’ trust in platform, whereas only service delivery quality negatively influences users’ distrust in platform. Furthermore, trust in platform directly triggers curiosity whereas distrust in platform positively influences users’ feeling-of-deprivation, which in turn triggers curiosity. In this sense, our analytical results reveal the mediating roles of distrust in platform and feeling-of-deprivation in the relationship between service delivery quality and curiosity.