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Record W4417501845 · doi:10.1287/msom.2025.0348

Valuing Influence with Social Learning

2025· article· en· W4417501845 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueManufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicDigital Marketing and Social Media
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSocial learningInfluencer marketingIntuitionValue (mathematics)Meaning (existential)Context (archaeology)Social commerce

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Problem definition: Influencer marketing has become a prevalent strategy to promote products through social media. This paper examines the value of influencer marketing when followers not only learn from the influencer’s signal but can also engage in social learning by observing peers’ purchase behaviors and reviews. Methodology/results: We adopt an information design framework to analyze how a firm should value an influencer based on two key dimensions: the accuracy of the influencer’s past recommendations (informativeness) and the extent to which followers rely exclusively on the influencer versus learning from peers (charisma). Managerial implications: Our model uncovers insights about the interaction between information design and social learning. First, the naive intuition that the influencer is less valuable with social learning does not always hold. The influencer holds greater value under the social learning context when customers have a moderate intention to buy as her endorsement reinforces customer convictions, making them resilient against later negative feedback from other followers. Second, when the firm can strategically select an influencer, the optimal information structure is biased toward the positive signals: always endorse good products (true-positive rate of one) but sometimes endorse bad products (nonzero false-positive rate). Third, the optimal influencer when social learning exists has a lower false-positive rate than the one without social learning, meaning that when there exists subsequent social learning, it becomes even more important to have an influencer whose positive endorsement is trustworthy. In other words, the optimal influencer should be able to reveal more information with social learning than without social learning. Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [Grant 2208189]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2025.0348 .

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.653
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.007
GPT teacher head0.268
Teacher spread0.261 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it