题目：HighestContributions from Others: A Dampening Effect on PWYW Payment

时间：2019年1月2日中午12:30-1:30

地点：主教楼615会议室

主讲人：马雪静，北京大学光华管理学院市场营销系博士生

摘要：Traditionallyimplemented within private contexts, Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) pricing hasemerged in online social contexts in which individuals’payment behavior can beobserved publicly. In this paper, we analyze how others influence individuals’payment behavior under PWYWpricing. Specifically, we focus on the effect of the highest contribution fromothers and examine three potential explanations: anchoring, signaling, andcrowd-out. We develop a set of theoretical predictions on individual paymentincidence and payment amount based on each explanation. We then conduct anempirical analysis using a large-scale, individual-level data set with 2.7million observations from a live streaming platform with PWYW pricing. Weuncover a robust, yet striking finding: namely, the highest payment from othershas a negative effect on both individual payment incidence and payment amount,suggesting that the crowd-out effect is the primary driving force. Furthermore,we find that the crowd-out effect is attenuated by individuals’experience with live streamingand gift payments on the platform. Our findings have important managerialimplications for firms that adopt PWYW pricing in a social context. Whilehighlighting large payments from others is commonly used by live streamingplatforms to induce more and higher payments, it can actually do the oppositeby hurting the revenue of the platform, since information of the highestpayment from others reduces individuals’payment incentives by lowering their payment likelihood and amount.