Creator Economy SIG Special Session: Current Research into the Creator Economy
(A2025-126356)

AUTHORS

Yanting He, Imperial College London; Victoria Meil, University of Mannheim; Amelie Huber, TUM School of Management; Peter Giger, University of St. Gallen

ABSTRACT

In today’s digital age, user-generated content (UGC) platforms are integral to consumers’ daily lives, serving as hubs for entertainment, information, and commerce. These platforms are also pivotal in shaping the ever-evolving landscape of influencer marketing, where creators and brands strive to connect authentically with audiences. This special session brings together research projects that explore how to enhance the effectiveness of influencer endorsements, delving into topics ranging from private interactions to perceptions of authenticity, equity in pay, and the psychological impact of virtual influencers. “Private Messaging in the Creator Economy” by Yanting He (Imperial College Business School), and Andreas Lanz (University of Basel) aims to shed light on an understudied aspect of the creator economy: the creator’s trade-off between interacting with current followers and addressing potential prospective ones, namely retention versus acquisition. For this purpose, the authors study the key feature of user-generated content platforms in this respect, namely the private messaging feature that allows creators to privately communicate with current followers and others. “Effort Over Impulse – The Surprising Relationship between Effort and Authenticity on Social Media” by Peter Giger (University of St. Gallen) and Reto Hofstetter (University of St. Gallen). Conventional wisdom suggests that spontaneity, rather than effort, is perceived as more authentic. For example, consider an influencer who casually posts an update while walking to the beach. Even with spelling mistakes, or perhaps because of them, such a post might feel more authentic than one where the influencer invested significant time and effort to create a perfectly polished post. However, our findings across eight studies show the opposite: effort increases perceived authenticity. We show that this effect stems from the increased trustworthiness attributed to visible effort. Interestingly, the effect attenuates in the context of sponsored content. “Unequal Influencer – Gender Pay and Negotiations in Influencer Marketing by Victoria Meil (University of Mannheim), Maximilian Beichert (Bocconi University), and Oded Netzer (Columbia University). This paper leverages a unique dataset of over 7,500 paid endorsements by influencers on Instagram and the corresponding fees to study factors affecting negotiation and pricing. Building on previous literature around gender discrepancies in negotiation, we focus on gender differences in remuneration for influencers. We identify a persistent gender pay gap in influencer marketing, strongly dependent on follower counts. Preliminary results suggest that female influencers are rewarded based on performance, while male influencers benefit from their perceived scarcity in negotiations. “Human responses to virtual influencers: A meta-analysis” by Amelie Huber (Technical University of Munich), Julia Diana Lenk (University of Hamburg), Jochen Hartmann (Technical University of Munich) is the first comprehensive meta-analysis to examine human responses to virtual versus human influencers, analyzing 247 effect sizes from 51 studies with over 14,000 participants to resolve empirical contradictions in this emerging field.