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This study aims to conceptualize and test the effect of monetary and non-monetary incentives for word-of-mouth (WOM) campaigns on the brand attitude of those receiving an incentivized brand recommendation. It also studied whether or not the type of relationship between the recommender and the person who receives the recommendation and the expertise of the recommender moderate the impact of incentivization on brand attitude. The results should enable brand management to improve the design of WOM campaigns.

An experiment was conducted utilizing a sample of about 645 respondents in Thailand. In a 3 × 3 experimental design, three levels of incentivization and three types of social relationships were manipulated. All other variables were measured through a respondent-administered questionnaire. For incentivization of WOM, monetary reward and non-monetary reward are compared to a non-incentivized control state. The three types of social relationships are an authority relationship, a kinship relationship and a market pricing relationship between strangers as the control state.

The results of the experiment show that the introduction of rewards for recommendations harms the attitude of the receiver of a recommendation toward the brand. The attitude of potential buyers toward the brand can be tainted by the impression that a brand has enticed friends and relatives into profiting from their relationship. The negative effects increase further with the introduction of cash rewards. Contrary to expectations, however, the social relationship between the recommender and the new customer did not moderate the effect of incentivization. Source expertise has a direct as well as moderating effect on brand attitude.

The findings suggest that companies should use referral rewards with caution. Brand managers need to be aware that there is a trade-off between the advantages and the disadvantages of incentivized WOM campaigns. Recommendations have been derived about how to improve the design of incentivized WOM campaigns. Whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages probably depend to some extent on brand-specific factors such as brand strength and market- or industry-specific factors, such as a credence good quality within the industry. It also emphasized that WOM campaigns need to be carefully monitored by measuring customer attitudes toward the brand.

Although past research provides valuable conceptual and empirical insights into consumer responses in incentivized WOM situations, most research has focused on the immediate effectiveness of WOM by measuring purchasing intentions. There is still a lack of information about how different kinds of incentivization affect customer attitudes toward a brand that incentivizes WOM, and how various relationship types moderate the effects; in particular, authority relationships have not yet been studied in this context.

The purpose of this paper is to research the effect of uncertain rewards on the recommendation intention in referral reward programs (RRPs) and investigate the interaction of tie strength and reward type on the recommendation intention.

The research adopts a quantitative exploratory approach through the use of experiments. Study 1 adopted a 2×2 between-participants design ((reward type: certain reward vs uncertain reward)×(tie strength: strong tie vs weak tie)). Respectively, by manipulating uncertain probabilities and expected value, Studies 2 and 3 further explore the effect of uncertain rewards and tie strength on customers’ referral intention.

This paper finds the following: compared to certain rewards, customers’ referral intention under uncertain rewards is higher and positive experience has a mediating effect between reward type and recommendation intention; when only the recommender is rewarded, the tie strength between the recommender and the receiver moderates the effect of reward type on the recommendation intention; for strong ties, customers’ recommendation intention is higher in uncertain reward condition, but for weak ties, customers’ willingness to recommend is almost the same in both reward types; when both the recommender and the receiver are rewarded, although certain rewards have a higher expected value than uncertain and random rewards, for strong ties, the participants have a higher referral intention under random rewards than that under uncertain rewards, which have a higher referral willingness than that under certain rewards. Additionally, for weak ties, the reverse is true.

The research has both theoretical implications for research on uncertain rewards and tie strength and practical implications for marketing managers designing and implementing RRPs.

The goal of this study is to investigate the mediating effect of referral rewards on consumer willingness to recommend poverty-alleviating products and to identify the most effective referral rewards for incentivizing consumers to recommend poverty-alleviating products.

Tournament rewards and piece-rate rewards are designed based on the theory of indebtedness, the related literature and the actual background. SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 17.0 are used to analyze the structural equation model.

According to the structural equation analysis, the following findings were found: under the tournament reward condition, social image, feelings of indebtedness and perceived reward value negatively affect consumer willingness to recommend. Under the piece-rate reward condition, social image and feelings of indebtedness significantly negatively affect consumer recommendation willingness, while perceived reward value significantly positively affects consumer recommendation willingness. The mean recommendation willingness of the tournament reward group is significantly lower than that of the control group. In contrast, the mean recommendation willingness of the piece-rate rewards group is significantly higher than that of the control group.

Based on the study findings, the authors propose that enterprises apply piece-rate rewards to incentivize consumers to recommend poverty-alleviating products when designing such rewards. In this way, the sale of poverty-alleviating products can be improved.

Many recommender systems are generally unable to provide accurate recommendations to users with limited interaction history, which is known as the cold-start problem. This issue can be resolved by trivial approaches that select random items or the most popular one to recommend to the new users. However, these methods perform poorly in many cases. This paper aims to explore the problem that how to make accurate recommendations for the new users in cold-start scenarios.

In this paper, the authors propose embedded-bandit method, inspired by Word2Vec technique and contextual bandit algorithm. The authors describe user contextual information with item embedding features constructed by Word2Vec. In addition, based on the intelligence measurement model in Crowd Science, the authors propose a new evaluation method to measure the utility of recommendations.

The authors introduce Word2Vec technique for constructing user contextual features, which improved the accuracy of recommendations compared to traditional multi-armed bandit problem. Apart from this, using this study’s intelligence measurement model, the utility also outperforms.

Improving the accuracy of recommendations during the cold-start phase can greatly raise user stickiness and increase user favorability, which in turn contributes to the commercialization of the app.

The algorithm proposed in this paper reflects that user contextual features can be represented by clicked items embedding vector.

Researches have already pointed out the linkage between pro-male bias and performance evaluation system. The main aim of this study is to understand how far different dimensions of performance measures are susceptible to gender stereotype.

Two separate experimental researches were designed to understand whether the performance assessment is purely based on objective criteria or it is governed by the gender stereotype. Two different performance dimensions of assessment were considered in this study as follows: interactional (behavioural) and procedural. 129 customer care managers from four metro cities of India voluntarily participated in this experimental research and played the role of performance evaluator. These managers were placed in different experimental conditions related to different combinations of gender and justice variations (interactional or procedural).

This study reveals that in violation of behaviour-based performance norm (interactional justice norm), female employees were rated less favourably than male employee both in terms of performance rating and reward recommendation by the managers, but it is not in case of procedural justice violation.

This article has experimentally proved how gender stereotype can distort the performance evaluation of behavioural dimension.

This study aims to test how senior leaders recognize and reward the same leadership behavior in male and female managers.

A total of 120 senior government leaders evaluated simulated performance reviews wherein only manager ' s sex and engagement in individually considerate transformational leadership behavior varied.

Senior leaders (of both sexes) penalized male and female managers for failing to engage in individually considerate transformational leadership behavior (i.e. rating them as significantly less competent and civil, and recommending them for significantly fewer rewards such as salary and promotion) compared to control groups. However, only male managers benefited (in terms of competence ratings, recognition and reward) from being rated high on this behavior.

Findings support arguments in the literature for a “feminization” of leadership, whereby both male and female managers are now penalized for not engaging in individually considerate leadership behavior. However, they also question the extent to which women will get credit for engaging in some of the same transformational leadership behaviors as men.

Researchers and practitioners often collapse across components of the Multi-Factor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) in measuring transformational leadership behavior. This may obfuscate some of the components being aligned with sex role stereotypes, and therefore unlikely to be rewarded in certain candidates. If the present findings are confirmed by future research, there may be reason to question how the MLQ is being used in research and practice on transformational leadership behavior.

For decades organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has been of interest to scholars and practitioners alike, generating a significant amount of research exploring the concept of what citizenship behavior is, and its antecedents, correlates, and consequences. While these behaviors have been and will continue to be valuable, there are changes in the workplace that have the potential to alter what types of OCBs will remain important for organizations in the future, as well as what types of opportunities for OCB exist for employees. In this chapter we consider the influence of 10 workplace trends related to human resource management that have the potential to influence both what types of citizenship behaviors employees engage in and how often they may engage in them. We build on these 10 trends that others have identified as having the potential to shape the workplace of the future, which include labor shortages, globalization, immigration, knowledge-based workers, increase use of technology, gig work, diversity, changing work values, the skills gap, and employer brands. Based on these 10 trends, we develop propositions about how each trend may impact OCB. We consider not only how these trends will influence the types of citizenship and opportunities for citizenship that employees can engage in, but also how they may shape the experiences of others related to OCB, including organizations and managers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of caste identity in applied settings. The authors do this within the larger framework of affirmative action programs (AAPs) or “reservations” in India. The paper explores the interplay of a primordial identity like caste with the modern institutions representing equality – a context unique to India.

The paper reports the findings of two experimental studies collecting data using Mechanical Turk.

The first study finds that an individual hired under the AAP is perceived poorly on his/her competence and reward worthiness. The second study finds support for the influence of an individual’s conception of modern casteism and his/her caste identity as factors in shaping attitudes toward AAP.

The paper lays the groundwork but does not explore the contours of casteism in contemporary India. Understanding of this construct as well as the impact of factors as region, education, urbanization, religion, nature of employment, etc. on caste dynamics should be considered by future research.

The paper uncovers some similarities between Indian and Western findings, but it also demonstrates key differences between findings related to race-based AAPs in the West and the caste-based AAP in India. This understanding will guide discourses on diversity management in under-researched countries like India. The findings can sensitize organizations to the need for addressing unconscious biases related to caste.

The paper underscores the continuing relevance of caste in modern India and the negative perceptions of lower castes. The paper finds that individuals with an appreciation of the subtle forms of casteism are sympathetic to programs that promote social equality. In modern social contexts this nuanced operationalization of casteism can be a relevant indicator of caste dynamics.

This is the first empirical study to examine caste-based AAP in India in an applied study and unpacks the psychological underpinnings of the attitudes toward AAP.

This study seeks to examine the effect of pricing as a marketing instrument to stimulate word‐of‐mouth (WOM) by comparing the influence of two pricing strategies (i.e. a low‐complexity vs a network‐effects tariff) on the referral behaviour.

Using customer data from a German mobile network operator (including information on customer characteristics, referral behaviour, and service usage), the authors develop a logit model.

Surprisingly, the results indicate that it is the low‐complexity tariff that increases the likelihood of referrals and leads to an overall higher referral activity. Despite the lower referral activity, however, the network‐effects tariff generates higher revenues.

The results show that companies can use pricing schemes to influence referral behaviour and strongly indicate the need of further research on manageable tools to stimulate word‐of‐mouth marketing.

The findings show not only that pricing has an impact on customers' referral behaviour but also that it is the low‐complexity tariffs that trigger referrals. Furthermore, the results underline the importance of considering the monetary value of referrals.

In contrast with many previously conducted studies on customer referrals, the paper explicitly analyses the impact of pricing on referral behaviour and empirically shows that firms are able to actively manage WOM among customers.

Knowledge is becoming a critically importance resource in contemporary business organizations, a development posing significant issues for HRM. Draws together various strands of theory, research and practice to develop a better understanding of these issues, with special emphasis on HRM practice in knowledge‐intensive organizations. Discusses the difficulties of making a transition from traditional forms of HRM to post‐industrial approaches. A review of traditional compensation systems serves as the basis for a series of propositions concerning preferred practice in this critically important area. The major contention is that the managers of knowledge‐intensive organizations are confronting major new issues in co‐ordinating and directing the effort of knowledge workers. The major conclusion is that existing compensation structures and routines must be re‐thought and makes several suggestions in this regard.