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This study aims to examine if the participation of live-stream influencers (LSIs) affects tipping frequency on live streaming platforms, and further investigate the mediating and moderating mechanisms.

Quasi-experiment and difference-in-differences models are used for data analysis. Propensity score matching is used to address potential unobservable endogeneity.

Real-time live streaming data reveal that LSIs’ participation significantly improves tipping frequency in live streaming rooms. Also, more users are attracted to the live streaming rooms and more users become active in participation. Additionally, the positive impact of LSIs’ participation is enhanced in the live streaming rooms with a greater number of relationship links between users.

The findings clarify the new role of influencers and reveal the mechanisms on how LSIs benefit the platforms.

The findings offer novel insights into implementing influencer marketing to interactive social media platforms, by encouraging influencer participation, user relationship building and influencer network growth.

This study highlights the value of LSIs for interactive social media platforms in terms of organic growth, revenue generation and cost reduction.

Online retailers are pioneering the incentivization of customers to generate more product reviews by rewarding them. However, little is known about the impact of reward types on customers' review behavior, including review frequency and sentiment. To address this gap, we investigated the effects of different reward types on customers' review behavior and how these rewards influence customers' review behavior.

We collected secondary data and empirically tested the hypothesis by analyzing the change in reward policy. Regression and two-stage Heckman models were applied to investigate the effects, with the latter used to control potential selection issues.

The results revealed that monetary rewards can stimulate customers to generate more positive product reviews. Furthermore, the reward amount has a negative moderating effect on the aforementioned relationship. Additionally, customer tenure negatively moderates the relationship between monetary rewards and review behavior.

This study contributes to the understanding of user-generated content motivation and provides managerial implications for reward programs.

Facilitated by image retouch tools, social media influencers can digitally enhance their self-image in product recommendation posts. This paper proposes that image enhancement may serve as a cue for the audience to assess the authenticity of the influencer (“true to oneself”), which further affects the influencer's product recommendation effectiveness (i.e. attitudes toward the post and recommended product).

Experiment 1 examines the effect of image enhancement on consumers' perceived influencer authenticity and product recommendation effectiveness. Experiment 2 considers the moderating role of post type, examining the effects in informational versus storytelling posts.

Consumers perceived an influencer to be more authentic when the image is not enhanced; in turn, consumers reported more favorable attitudes toward the post and the recommended product upon reading the post. The effects are moderated by post type: the effect of image enhancement (through perceived influencer authenticity) exists in posts using an informational message format but is attenuated for those using a storytelling message format.

This research enriches the literature on authenticity cues by documenting a novel visual cue and contributes to influencer marketing by identifying a nuanced interactive effect between image enhancement and post type on recommendation effectiveness.

A critical step in influencer marketing is influencer outreach, where a brand reaches out to an influencer and forms a partnership. Yet little is known about how factors related to this process might influence the outcomes of sponsored posts. To address this gap, the authors investigated whether, how and when the order of influencers' product use and brand outreach (i.e. use/outreach order) affects post persuasiveness.

The authors conducted three experimental studies. Studies 1 and 2 examined the effect of disclosure type (use-first, outreach-later vs. outreach-first, use-later vs. no disclosure) on consumers' responses to the post. Study 3 investigated the moderating effects of compensation disclosure type.

The results revealed that when the influencer used the product before (vs. after) being contacted by the brand, consumers had more favorable attitudes about the product and greater purchase intention upon reading the sponsored posts; perceived information diagnosticity mediated this effect. However, this tendency was mitigated if the influencer disclosed the specific monetary payment from the brand.

This research advances understanding of sponsorship disclosure and provides a way to manage its impact on message persuasiveness.

The existing research does not systematically explore customers' option about different payment methods, nor does it analyze how shopping channels and shopping scale affect customers' option about different payment methods. Furthermore, there is a lack of exploration on what the relationship is, and how they are adjusted by customer purchasing experience. The authors’ research questions are: (1) when using different shopping channels in online retailing, whether customers will choose different types of payment methods? (2) Does the purchase amounts affect customers' choice of different payment methods?

This study takes 60,484 customers from JD.com, one of the largest B2C platforms in China, as the research object and collects the purchase data of these customers from October 01, 2012 to December 31, 2013, and analyzes them through panel data models.

Based on their purchase data, the authors find the main results by using panel data model that (1) the use of mobile channel has a positive effect on cash on delivery (COD), implying that when consumers use mobile to purchase, they have a higher possibility to use COD, (2) the order size has a positive effects on COD, that is to say, when the purchase amount increases, the possibility of using COD also increases. (3) Furthermore, when consumers' purchase experience abound, mobile channel's positive effect on COD will be decreased, but it does not affect the positive effect between order size and COD.

From the aspects of shopping channels, product attributes and customer purchase experience, it fills the gaps in the research on the preselection of payment methods and makes research of payment methods a complete research system. Secondly, this study adds COD to the options of payment method selection. Finally, the moderating effect of customer shopping experience from a dynamic perspective elaborates that customers can learn from multiple purchases and overcome the shopping risks brought by shopping channels, thereby reducing the probability of choosing a COD method.