Cross-Platform Spillover Effect of Promotion (Jeong & Chung 2026) | FT50 POM

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Reference

Jeong, S., Cho, S., & Chung, M. (2026). EXPRESS: Cross-Platform Spillover Effect of Promotion: Evidence from the PC Game Market. Production and Operations Management, 0(ja). https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478261421045

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You’re welcome to Revise and Resubmit 🎙️📚 where serious research meets real life, and where today’s big idea might be hiding in plain sight inside the thing you did to procrastinate last night.

Picture this 🎮⚡: a marketplace built like a neon arcade, two giants facing off across the same glowing shelf of identical PC games. On one side, Steam. On the other, Epic Games Store. And then Epic pulls a move that feels almost… generous. A selected game goes free for a week 🆓⏳. In the old, brick-and-mortar logic, that should be the moment Steam feels the floor tilt. Price drops, demand shifts, competitor bleeds. Simple. Neat. Predictable.

But the internet is not a neat place. The internet is a place where attention ricochets 🔁👀, where desire forms in public, where a “free” button can still lead you to a checkout somewhere else. And that’s exactly what this newly published paper reports: Epic’s free-week promotion doesn’t just move demand, it seems to light it up across the whole ecosystem. Sales of those same identical games on Steam jump by about 59.2%59.2% during the giveaway week 📈🔥. Yes, people could get the game for free on Epic, and still they paid for it on Steam.

Why? Because platforms are not only stores. They are habitats 🧩🌐. They have friend lists, achievements, reviews, mods, multiplayer communities, familiar interfaces, little rituals of belonging. And this study follows the consumer journey through the AIDA framework: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. The promotion sparks attention, sure, but action depends on everything that isn’t price: network effects, user communities, and the gravity of where your digital life already lives.

Today’s episode draws from: “Cross-Platform Spillover Effect of Promotion: Evidence from the PC Game Market” by Seongkyoon Jeong, Sanghoon Cho, and Moonwon Chung, published online 22 January 2026 in Production and Operations Management 🏛️✅, a truly prestigious FT50-listed journal.

If you like conversations where scholarship actually explains the weird world we’re living in, subscribe to “Revise and Resubmit” on Spotify 🎧 and follow the YouTube channel “Weekend Researcher” ▶️. You can also find the show on Amazon Prime and Apple Podcast 🍎📻.

And as we step into this strange little paradox, let’s ask the question that won’t leave me alone: when a rival gives something away for free, are they really stealing your customers, or are they secretly doing your marketing for you 🤔🔍?

Thanks to the authors, Seongkyoon Jeong, Sanghoon Cho, and Moonwon Chung, and thanks to SAGE Publications for publishing the article.