고객추천행동 촉진을 위한 인센티브 연구:성과보상과 비용보조를 중심으로

As customer referral becomes generally known to be important to accelerate sales, it has been one of the most important topics in marketing research areas how to promote customers’ referral. However, in spite of many comments which urging the study on the effective incentive schemes besides referral reward scheme, there has been scarce studies on them. Most of the previous researches have been focusing on the issue how much reward is optimal to promote customers’ referrals. In this paper, we introduce cost-subsidy as a possible incentive scheme to promote customer referrals along with the reward scheme which was analyzed in the Biyalogorsky, Gerstner, and Libai(2001)’s paper. We investigate the following issues via game-theoretic models: (1) is it better for the firm to use the possible incentive scheme of cost-subsidy in addition to the reward scheme to promote customers’ referral behavior? (2) how much cost-subsidy is recommended for the firm when the customers’ cost burden to make a referral increases? (3) what incentive structure is recommended for the firm when the customers’ hardlysubsidizable cost burden increases relative to that of easily-subsidizable? Our game models have the following characteristics: (1) we assume that there are one firm, one existing customer, and infinite potential customers(consumers) arriving at the market continuously, thus all of the following discussions of a customer refer to the rate of arrival in the interval dc, (2) we use negative exponential utility functions to describe constant absolute risk aversion like Hauser, Simester, and Wernerfelt(1994)’s paper, (3) the sequence of moves are as follows: ⓐ the firm announces prices and incentive systems, as consumers arrive sequentially and continuously, ⓑ the customer choose optimal referral effort level to maximize her expected utility, then the firm subsidize the customer’s cost burden immediately, ⓒ the firm measures sales volume due to customer’s referral and rewards the customer accordingly. Our major findings are as following: (1) the use of both referral reward and referral cost-subsidy results in greater surplus for both the firm and the customer than that of other scenarios. We find this after investigating three scenarios: (scenario 1) no incentive, (scenario 2) only reward incentive used, (scenario 3) both reward and cost-subsidy used. (2) the more gets the customers’ cost burden of referral, the less incentives are recommended in the equilibrium. (3) the more gets the customers’ hardly-subsidizable cost burden by the firm, the more reward incentive recommended relative to the cost-subsidy. One of the major contributions of this paper is that it is the first to investigate the usability of cost-subsidy type incentive mechanism to promote customers’ referral behavior besides reward-type incentive. In the future, researchers may develope more general model which comprises that of Biyalogorsky, Gerstner, and Libai(2001)’s and ours. Also, they may check up the validity of our model empirically.