Referral reward programs have been shown in past research to stimulate referrals and also to contribute positively to customer lifetime value and firms' profitability. In this paper we examine whether, how, and under what conditions providing a reward for a referral affects receivers' responses to the referral. Based on a multiple motives inference framework, we propose that rewards adversely affect responses because they lead receiving consumers to infer ulterior motives for the referral. Using experiments and a survey we find support for this hypothesis, and show that this effect is stronger for unsolicited and weak tie referrals. We also demonstrate that rewarding both referral provider and receiver, or providing symbolic rewards can eliminate the negative effect of rewarded referrals. The paper makes conceptual contributions to the literature on referral reward programs, word-of-mouth, and motive inferences. The work has implications for managers considering ways to construct referral programs and design marketing activities to increase referrals. Although word-of-mouth (WOM) has long been recognized as an important influence on consumers, for a variety of reasons research attention to WOM recently has surged. First, technology has allowed the emergence of new types of person-to-person interaction about products, and is shifting control of message and media timing to the consumer (cf., Libai et al.

In the current research, we study relationship norms in a word-of-mouth marketing context. The presence of a financial incentive for a recommendation implies that the word-of-mouth behavior

A rich tradition in self-control research has documented the negative consequences of exerting self-control in one task for self-control performance in subsequent tasks. However, there is a dearth of research examining what happens when people exert self-control in multiple domains simultaneously. The current research aims to fill this gap. We integrate predictions from the most prominent models of self-control with recent neuropsychological insights in the human inhibition system to generate the novel hypothesis that exerting effortful self-control in one task can simultaneously improve self-control in completely unrelated domains. An internal meta-analysis on all 18 studies we conducted shows that exerting self-control in one domain (i.e., controlling attention, food consumption, emotions or thoughts) simultaneously improves self-control in a range of other domains, as demonstrated by, for example, reduced unhealthy food consumption, better Stroop task performance, and less impulsive decision making. A subset of nine studies demonstrates the crucial nature of task timing -when the same tasks are executed sequentially, our results suggest the emergence of an ego depletion effect. We provide conservative estimates of the self-control facilitation (d = |0.22|) as well as the ego depletion effect size (d = |0.17|) free of data selection and publication biases. These results (i) shed new light on self-control theories, (ii) confirm recent claims that previous estimates of the ego depletion effect size were inflated due to publication bias, and (iii) provide a blueprint for how to handle the power issues and associated file drawer problems commonly encountered in multi-study research projects.

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Visceral states are known to reduce the ability to exert self-control. In the current research, we investigated how self-control is affected by a visceral factor associated with inhibition rather than with approach: bladder control. We designed four studies to test the hypothesis that inhibitory signals are not domain-specific but can spill over to unrelated domains, resulting in increased impulse control in the behavioral domain. In Study 1, participants' urination urgency correlated with performance on color-naming but not word-meaning trials of a Stroop task. In Studies 2 and 3, we found that higher levels of bladder pressure resulted in an increased ability to resist impulsive choices in monetary decision making. We found that inhibitory spillover effects are moderated by sensitivity of the Behavioral Inhibition System (Study 3) and can be induced by exogenous cues (Study 4). Implications for inhibition and impulse-control theories are discussed.