Reward and Risk in the Influencer Economy: Analyzing Collaborative Product Decisions and Risk Mitigation Strategies
研究了品牌制造商与网红合作推出产品时的定价和质量决策，分析了品牌的风险规避行为和网红的风险缓解努力，发现合作需要网红价值的安全阈值，且品牌的风险管理应因网红类型而异。
The influencer economy has evolved into a large and rapidly expanding yet increasingly risky industry. From the perspective of its impact on consumers' purchasing decisions, we categorize existing influencers into two categories and investigate the equilibrium pricing and quality of a brand manufacturer launching a collaborative product with an influencer. We further incorporate the brand's risk-averse behavior and the influencer's endogenous and exogenous risk mitigation efforts into the analytical framework. Our analyses reveal that, first, successful collaborations require a safety threshold for the influencer's value. Moreover, expanding the proportion of high-value consumers can lead to more growth than merely increasing the willingness to pay of existing high-value consumers in the collaborative product market. Second, even if risk-averse behavior can lead to tight operational decisions, the brand's revenue increases with the risk cost in relatively low-risk environments. Third, brand's risk management should vary depending on the level of influencer risk mitigation effort. This is because for the top high-entertainment influencers and the micro high-expertise influencers, they prefer to adhere to an exogenously fixed level. While for the micro high-entertainment influencers and the top high-expertise influencers, they are more motivated to discipline themselves endogenously. In the extensions, we explore in certain markets, including partial market coverage, brand and influencer competition, fixed-fee contracting and ethical misconduct risks, which underscore the robustness and provide practical insights.