Mobile app adoption in different life stages: An empirical analysis

The analysis of individuals' current life stages is a powerful approach for identifying und understanding patterns of human behavior. Different stages imply different preferences and consumer demands. Thus, life stages play an important role in marketing, economics, and sociology. However, such information is difficult to be obtained especially in the digital world. This work thus contributed to both theory and practice from two aspects. First, we conducted a large-scale empirical study with 1435 participants and showed that a person's mobile app adoption pattern is strongly influenced by her current life stage. Second, we presented a data-driven, highly-scalable, and real-time approach of predicting an individual's current life stage based on the apps she has installed on smartphone. Result showed that our predictive models were able to predict life stages with 241.0% higher precision and 148.2% higher recall than a random guess on average. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.