Contributed by: School of Management

Editor: Zhao Qiang

Recently, Professor Zhijun Yan and graduate Dr. He Huang from the Department of Management Engineering, School of Management and Economics, BIT, in collaboration with Professor Yan Huang from Carnegie Mellon University and Professor Han Zhang from Georgia Tech, published a research paper entitled Social Influence, Competition, and Free Riding: Examining Seller Interactions Within an Online Social Network in the top management JournalMIS Quarterly.

Social interactions among online sellers are critical to the healthy development of social commerce. Based on a social e-commerce company's WeChat seller network and sales data, the author of this paper uses instrumental variables as well as a fixed effects model to conduct in-depth analysis of the social interaction effects among online sellers. According to the empirical results, there are multiple asymmetric interaction effects among online sellers. First, there is a "top-down" social influence effect, in which the sales effort of higher-level sellers can significantly increase the sales effort of lower-level sellers, but lower-level sellers have no such effect on higher-level sellers. Second, the "top-down" competition effect: the positive effect of the higher-level sellers on the lower level sellers' sales efforts does not lead to an increase in the lower-level sellers' sales orders, because the higher-level sellers will continue to erode the lower- level sellers' sales market and reduce the lower-level sellers' customer base. Once again, there is a "bottom-up" "free-rider" effect, where the higher-level sellers are able to earn commissions from the sales orders of the lower-level sellers. The higher the commission, the stronger the willingness of the higher-level sellers to "piggyback" on the lower-level sellers' sales orders, and the less sales effort. The triple asymmetric interaction effect reveals the complexity of the interaction between online sellers, which is important for improving the seller interaction mechanism in the social commerce scenario. The paper also conducts robustness analysis from multiple perspectives to fully validate the role of triple asymmetric social interaction effects.

MIS Quarterlyis a top-ranked journal in the field of information management with a high academic reputation. It is one of the 24 (UTD 24) top academic journals in business schools selected by the University of Texas at Dallas and one of the top 50 (FT 50) journals in business schools as rated by the Financial Times.

Paper link: https://misq.umn.edu/social-influence-competition-and-free-riding-examining-seller-interactions-within-an-online-social-network.html