Incentives, positive emotions and SWOM intention: Moderating roles of allocation type and emotion regulation

With the increasing popularity of social networking sites (SNS), companies are adopting monetary incentives to generate eWOM on SNS (SWOM). Drawing on emotion and equity theories, this study explores effects of perceived magnitude of monetary incentives and emotions on consumer SWOM intention. In addition, this study investigates the moderating effects of allocation types of rewards (positive inequity and negative inequity) and emotion regulation (reappraisal and suppression emotion regulation) on these relationships. An online situational experiment was conducted and yielded valid responses from 193 WeChat users in China. With the preliminary data, we tested the direct, mediation, and moderation effects using SmartPLS 3.0. The empirical results show that (1) perceived monetary incentives have a positive effect on SWOM intention; (2) positive emotions of senders mediates the relationship between incentives and SWOM intention; (3) negative-inequity incentives negatively moderates the relationship between incentives and positive emotion, while the moderating effect of positive-inequity incentives is insignificant on the relationship between incentives and positive emotion; (4) reappraisal emotion regulation strengthens the effect of positive emotion on SWOM intention, whereas the moderating effect of suppression emotion regulation between positive emotion and SWOM intention is not statistically significant.