A one-sentence tweet or a one-hour video? Influencing the Influencer’s Recommendations with Discounts
判决
广告
业务
计算机科学
自然语言处理
作者
Baojun Jiang,Özge Turut,Tianxin Zou
出处
期刊:Social Science Research Network [Social Science Electronic Publishing] 日期:2021-01-01被引量:4
标识
DOI:10.2139/ssrn.3922188
摘要
When firms promote their products through influencers to boost product sales, they face a major challenge in controlling the influencers’ recommendation content, especially its informativeness about product features. This paper studies how a firm can use price discounts (e.g., influencer promo codes) for customers referred by an influencer to influence her recommendation informativeness to improve the firm’s profit. We show that the influencer, who is concerned about both her sale commission and her recommendation’s benefits to consumers, is more likely to make an uninformative recommendation when the discount is deeper. Hence, the firm should either do mass targeting using a deep discount that induces the influencer’s uninformative recommendation or target only high-valuation consumers using a shallow discount that induces an informative recommendation. Interestingly, we find that after accounting for the influencer’s decision about her recommendation’s informativeness and the firm’s strategic discount decision, an increase in the firm’s per-sale commission paid to the influencer can benefit the firm but hurt the influencer, and the influencer’s stronger concern about her recommendation’s benefit to consumers or her lower cost of making informative recommendations can hurt the firm, the influencer, and the consumers at the same time. Counterintuitively, firms’ competition for an influencer’s recommendation spot can hurt consumers although the competition leads to deeper discounts.