This paper is concerned with an empirical context where uncertain incentives are widely used in motivating customers’ online behavior such as generating and spreading online word of mouth. Using a data set scraped from Sina Weibo, this study takes the first step in examining the effects of social media lotteries on the customers’ engagement activities, defined as Likes, Comments and Reposts.

The main findings are (i) weibo lotteries are very effective at enhancing customer engagement under the lottery tweet; (2) the increases in customer engagement activities are directly and most strongly boosted by the lottery’s entry requirements; (3) weibo lotteries have significant positive spillover effects on the customer engagement activities with respect to subsequent regular tweets po...[ Read more ]

This paper is concerned with an empirical context where uncertain incentives are widely used in motivating customers’ online behavior such as generating and spreading online word of mouth. Using a data set scraped from Sina Weibo, this study takes the first step in examining the effects of social media lotteries on the customers’ engagement activities, defined as Likes, Comments and Reposts.

The main findings are (i) weibo lotteries are very effective at enhancing customer engagement under the lottery tweet; (2) the increases in customer engagement activities are directly and most strongly boosted by the lottery’s entry requirements; (3) weibo lotteries have significant positive spillover effects on the customer engagement activities with respect to subsequent regular tweets posted by the same user.