Influencer marketing and product competition

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Cong, Lin William; Li, Siguang
• 署名单位: National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2024.105867
• 发表日期: 2024
• 关键词: Creator economy; Digital economy; Internet celebrity; Industrial Organization; Streaming

摘要

With the rise of social platforms and digital media (e.g., videos, (live)streaming, and multi-media blogs), firms and brand owners increasingly depend on influencers to attract consumers, who care about both product quality and consumer-influencer interaction. Sellers thus compete in both influencer and product markets. We develop a theory to understand the influencer labor market and its interaction with product competition, under a plausible specification of influencers' value added. We find: (i) more powerful influencers sell better quality products for sellers with weaker direct-sale capacity, facilitating seller competition; (ii) advances in the intermediation technology can lead to non-monotonic changes in influencers' payoff and income inequality; (iii) style pluralism mitigates market concentration by horizontally differentiating the consumer experience but serves as either complements (intermediate style dispersion) or substitutes (small or large dispersions) to vertical product differentiation; and (iv) influencers may inefficiently under-invest in consumer outreach and unidirectional exclusivity can improve welfare in less competitive markets. Collectively, our findings highlight the novelty of the influencer economy and establish several theoretical baselines for future studies.