Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine how enterprises use referral reward programs to acquire new customerseffectively. We adopt two experimental designs and establish four hypotheses based on how referral rewardsubject category and reward type affect the likelihood of customer response. The results show thatlow-involvement products should reward recipients or offer financial rewards to increase intent to purchase.Customers perceive fairness of distributive justice as the underlying mechanism for the influence that rewardrecipient category and product involvement have on intent to purchase. Finally, implications and limitations forfuture research are discussed.

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