Recently, the paper titled “Do Larger Audiences Generate Greater Revenues under Pay What You Want? Evidence from a Live Streaming Platform” with Dr. Xingyu Chen (Associate Professor in the Department of Marketing in the College of Management at Shenzhen University) as the corresponding author was officially accepted by Marketing Science (SSCI, latest impact factor 3.019), one of UTD24 top journals. This paper was co-authored with Dr. Shijie Lu (Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Bauer College of Business at University of Houston), Dr. Dai Yao (Assistant Professor of Marketing in the NUS Business School at National University of Singapore), and Professor Rajdeep Grewal (Townsend Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Area Chair of Marketing in the Kenan-Flagler Business School at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
As live streaming of events gains traction, pay-what-you-want (PWYW) pricing strategies are emerging as critical monetization tools. This research assesses the viability of PWYW by examining the relationship between popularity (i.e., audience size) of a live streaming event and the revenue it generates under a PWYW scheme. On one hand, increasing audience size may enhance voluntary payment/tips if social image concerns are important, because larger audiences amplify the utility pertaining to social image. On the other hand, increasing audience size can reduce tips if gaining the broadcaster’s reciprocal acts motivates tipping because larger audiences are associated with fiercer competition for reciprocity. To examine these trade-offs in the relationship between audience size and revenue under PWYW, this research manipulates audience size by exogenously adding synthetic viewers in live streaming shows on a platform in China. The results reveal a mostly positive relationship between audience size and average tip per viewer, which suggests that social image concerns dominate seeking reciprocity. In support of herding, adding synthetic viewers also increases the number of real viewers. Social image concerns and herding together explain the finding that adding one additional viewer improves the tipping revenue per minute (approximately by 1% of the mean level). Overall, the results indicate that revenues under PWYW do not scale linearly and support the relevance of social image concerns in driving individual payment decisions under PWYW.
Marketing Science, as one of the top four journals in marketing published by INFORMS, is included in the UTD list of 24 journals (UTD24) and the FT list of 50 journals (FT50). The UTD24 journals, compiled by the University of Texas at Dallas, are the top journals used to provide the top 100 business school rankings since 1990 based on the total contributions of faculty. The FT50 journals, selected by the world's leading global business publication Financial Times, are the most prestigious academic journals used for ranking global business schools. This paper is Dr. Xingyu Chen’s second FT50 paper. Her first FT50 paper as the first author was published in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (SSCI, latest impact factor 7.959) in 2019. Meanwhile, this paper is also the second UTD24 paper published by the faculty of College of Management at Shenzhen University. The first UTD24 paper with Dr. Yinghui Zhou as the first author was accepted in Journal of Marketing Research (SSCI, latest impact factor 4.626) in 2020.
