Designing Promotional Incentives to Embrace Social Sharing: Evidence from Field and Online Experiments
Authors: Sun, Tianshu; Viswanathan, Siva; Huang, Ni; Zheleva, Elena
Journal: MIS Quarterly (2021)
<jats:p>Despite the increasing connectivity between consumers and the large volume of social shares supported by digital technologies, there is an absence of research systematically investigating how firms can design promotional incentives that jointly consider their consumers as both purchasers and sharers. In this study, we examine whether and how firms can leverage consumers’ social connections and engage consumers to share promotional incentives. In collaboration with a leading online deal platform, we report a large-scale randomized field experiment to test the effectiveness of different incentive designs (varying in the shareability and scarcity of promotion codes) in driving social sharing senders’ purchases and successful referrals. We find that the different incentive designs have distinct impacts on the purchase and referral outcomes. Specifically, providing senders with one non-shareable promo code significantly increases their own purchase likelihood, compared to the other experimental groups. In contrast, senders who receive one shareable promo code are less likely to purchase themselves yet are more likely to make successful referrals. Surprisingly, the incentive des…