Work

A systematic review of research on digital mobile payment apps

Year: 2025

Type: review

Abstract: Digital Mobile Payment Applications (DMPAs) have become critical components of contemporary digital economies, mediating not only financial transactions but also platform governance, user behavior, and socio-technical regulation. While scholarly inquiry into DMPAs remains theoretically fragmented, with insufficient integration across behavioral, institutional, and infrastructural perspectives. This study addresses this gap through a systematic bibliometric review of 461 peer-reviewed articles published between 2013 and 2023, retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection. Employing VOSviewer and CiteSpace, we map the field’s intellectual structure through co-authorship networks, disciplinary collaborations, and thematic keyword clustering. While user-centric frameworks remain prevalent, our findings reveal a growing, yet underdeveloped, body of work on platform governance, stakeholder dynamics, and cross-border regulatory asymmetries. We argue for a shift beyond technocentric models toward multi-stakeholder, infrastructural, and cross-cultural analyses, grounded in critical digital infrastructure studies. The study concludes with a future research agenda that advances interdisciplinary integration and addresses regulatory heterogeneity to better conceptualize DMPAs as evolving socio-technical systems.

Source: Telematics and Informatics

DOI: 10.1016/j.tele.2025.102345

Author: Lin Yue

Institution: Università della Svizzera italiana

Language: English

Topic: Digital Platforms and Economics

Subfield: Strategy and Management

Field: Business, Management and Accounting

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $4,020

Funders: Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, China Scholarship Council