The moderating role of perceived social risk in bank credit card referral programs
International Journal of Bank Marketing
ISSN: 0265-2323
Article publication date: 7 October 2020
Issue publication date: 26 October 2020
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the effects of referral rewards in referral reward programs (RRPs) are moderated through perceived social risk of a recommender.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 717 consumers are accessed through Amazon's Mechanical Turk worker panel. The authors use t-test and analysis of variance to test the proposed hypotheses.
Findings
The findings show that consumers with high perceived social risk balance financial rewards with social risks, while low social risk consumers largely ignore these social risk elements surrounding a referral decision.
Originality/value
The inclusion of perceived social risk provides the opportunity to fully understand how a consumer goes about balancing social risk and referral rewards in making referral decisions. The concept of social risk has not been previously applied to this context.
Keywords
Citation
Song, C., Wang, T., Lee, H. and Hu, M.Y. (2020), "The moderating role of perceived social risk in bank credit card referral programs", International Journal of Bank Marketing, Vol. 38 No. 7, pp. 1601-1616. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJBM-05-2020-0291
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited