| Based on the situation of smartphone applications’ attracting new customers,we study the perfornance of online social referral systems from two aspects:the willingness of referral proposer’s sending a referral and the probability of referral responder,s aceepting a referral.We focus on the information order,social distance and reward anount.Two methods were used in this study to measure social distance,affective distance and interactive distance in detail.In proposer’s aspect,with the help of a with-in-subject behavioral experiment of 38 subjects,we find that under short social distance,high reward amount and the information order of reward primacy,the proposer’s willingness of sending a referral is higher.The moderate effect of social distance on the information order has not been consistently concluded:with affective distance,the moderate effect is marginal significant,but with interactive distance or combine affective and interactive distance together,the moderate effect is not significant.Reward amount has a moderate efifect on information order.Under high reward anount,when the reward inforTation is displayed first,the proposer’s willingness of sending a referral is significantly higher than the APP information primacy condition but when under low reward amount,information order does not have a significant influence.In responder’s aspect,we collect the data of the responder’s behavior by proposer,s sending a referral via WeChat during the experiment.With a sample of 138 responders,we find that when under short social distance,low reward amount,and the information order of reward primacy,the responder’s acceptance probability is larger,but social distance and reward amount’s moderate effect on the information order do not appear to be significant.This paper expands the research eontext of online social referral systems,expands the research factors.By combining the proposer and responder together through a true referral,the external validity of the conclusion is more credible. |
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