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The expectations about how others may perceive us after giving them away part of a loyalty reward turned out to be a critical aspect when showing this type of

prosocial behaviour. Our results suggest that once the role of such expectations is understood, prosocial motives can be taken into account in order to design effective initiatives that aim to encourage the adoption of products or behaviours in general. In the last decade, evidence emerging from behavioural science has shown that

No. Hypothesis statement Results summary 1b ▪ People w ill expect more positive reactions from friends (recipients) w hen they face

loyalty schemes that share a larger proportion of the rew ard, compare to the situation in w hich the proportion being shared is smaller.

▪ The results w ere alligned w ith hypothesis' prediction.

2b.1 ▪ Changes in the amount of the rew ard w ill not affect participants’ preferences for loyalty schemes w hen sharing the loyalty rew ard w ith friends is associated w ith expectations about recipients’ reactions that are sufficiently positive.

▪ The results w ere alligned w ith hypothesis' prediction.

2b.2 ▪ When sharing the loyalty rew ard w ith a friend is not associated w ith sufficiently positive reactions from the recipient(s), smaller rew ards w ill encourage people to prefer loyalty schemes in w hich they keep the entire incentive for themselves, w hereas larger rew ards w ill make them more inclined to prefer schemes that allow them to share the rew ard w ith friends.

▪ The results w ere alligned w ith hypothesis' prediction. How ever, differences w ere statistically signifficant w hen people w here asked about the expectations of sharing the rew ard w ith one fiend, but not in the case of the expectations about sharing w ith tw o people. 3b ▪ People receiving a rew ard framed in terms of “Cash” w ill be more likely to prefer loyalty

schemes in w hich customers keep the entire rew ard for themselves, compared to those individuals receiving rew ards framed as “Products”.

▪ The results do not support the hypotnesis. No signifficant difference w here found.

4b ▪ When the loyalty rew ard is framed in terms of “Products”, people w ould expect more positive reactions from recipients in loyalty schemes that share part of the rew ard w ith friends, compared to the schemes in w hich the rew ard is entirely kept by the customers.

▪ The results do not support the hypothesis.

5b ▪ Loyalty schemes offering to share part of the incentive w ith other people w ould be more attractive w hen the loyalty rew ard is framed in terms of “Products” (non-monetary incentive), instead of framed as a “Cash” incentive.

▪ The results supprot the hypothesis in the case of the scheme sharing part of the rew ard w ith tw o friends, but not for the scheme dividing the incentive w ith only one person.

6b ▪ Peoples’ predisposition to fear negative evaluations from others w ill influence both their w illingness to favour loyalty schemes that share part of the rew ard w ith friends, and their expectations about how others may react after sharing the loyalty rew ard w ith them.

people can improve their well-being and happiness when they give away part of their wealth to others instead of focusing on selfish consumption (Aaker & Akutsu, 2009; Dunn et al., 2008). However, the fact that most people normally spend a very limited amount of their money or time on helping others may put in doubt the

effectiveness of unselfish motives as a mechanism to encourage behaviours. Our results indicate that one of the reasons why prosocial behaviours are not more prevalent is because they occur only when givers believe that there is a high probability of fulfilling recipients’ expectations. In this regard, the present study provides important insights that shed some lights on the conditions in which

prosocial motives can be effective in driving behaviours in a commercial context and probably in other environments.

Our experiments challenge previous research suggesting that people engage in unselfish behaviours simply for the sake of helping others to improve the recipients’ situation (e.g. Andreoni & Miller, 2002; Charness & Rabin, 2002). Instead, we argue that the possibility of fulfilling others’ expectations and receiving positive feedback from them has crucial element on prosocial behaviours. This is probably related to the human need for boosting or strengthening the self-concept, maintaining self- esteem and reaching a positive image by behaving in ways that are likely to result in a positive reaction from others (Baumeister, 2010; De Angelis et al., 2012; Wien & Olsen, 2014). We have shown in our experiment that commercial initiatives like loyalty programmes can be more appealing to customers when they represent a mechanism for maintaining a positive image about themselves. This evaluation could be achieved by allowing customers to show prosocial behaviours towards relevant peers as part of the loyalty scheme.

The impact of allowing customers to share larger proportions of a loyalty reward with others was, overall, associated with more positive Expectations about Friend’s

Reactions and higher preferences for this type of “unselfish schemes”, compared to the traditional programmes in which the entire reward is kept by the customer. However, when we explored the possibility of an interactive effect between the Reward Amount and the Expectations about Friend’s Reactions, the results took an interesting twist. Specifically, we found that participants expecting more negative (instead of positive) reactions from their friends were more likely to prefer sharing the loyalty incentive with others when the reward was large (£5) instead of small (£2). We claim that this contradictory results can be reconciled in light of the trends observed in our predictive model (particularly in Figure 13). To be precise, either positive or negative, more extreme Expectations about Friend’s Reactions seems to increase people’s preferences for a given option. In the case of the anticipation of extremely negative reactions, people may be more inclined to share larger amounts of the reward because in that way, they are more likely to fulfil recipients’

expectations. On the contrary, smaller amounts may not be likely to fulfil the

expectations of a friend who was already inclined to react negatively (or not positive enough) towards this type of gifts; therefore, participants may tend to keep the entire incentive for themselves in such circumstances. In the case of holding more positive expectations about recipients’ reactions, a similar effect could be

anticipated; in other words, participants should be more inclined to share larger proportions of the loyalty reward. On the contrary, more neutral expectations seemed to discourage people to give away part of their endowment.

The trends just described may relate to the literature on dictator game. This extensive literature approaching social preferences by implementing this

methodological tool has found contradictory results when varying the size of the stake available. While some researchers have claimed that variations in the size of the reward do not affect significantly the proportion of the reward that participants are willing to give away (e.g. Carpenter et al., 2005; Forsythe et al., 1994; List &

Cherry, 2008), others suggest that increasing the stake reduces the proportion of the stake that people share with recipients in the game (e.g. Bechler et al., 2015; Novakova & Flegr, 2013). In this regard, we claim that the possibility of fulfilling recipients’ expectations, and consequently, the chance of strengthening the self- concept, can account for this contradictory results. Nonetheless, we acknowledge that testing a larger range of reward amount and eliciting more extreme

expectations about recipients’ reactions is something needed in further research in order to be more confident regarding the plausibility of our explanation.

Another interesting result regarding the “unselfish” loyalty schemes proposed in the present study was related to the number of recipients with which the incentive was shared. In particular, we found in our predictive model that it was more likely to prefer to share a £5 reward than a £2 incentive. However, that likelihood was far larger when the reward was expected to be shared with two friends instead of one friend. In other words, people seemed to be concerned not only about giving away a gift to improve their friends’ situation but also about giving an amount that was “large enough” for each recipient, thus suggesting a concern for friends’ reactions. This result could account for the “identifiable victim effect” documented in the literature regarding charitable giving (Small & Loewenstein, 2003). Stated another way, people tend to care more about specific identifiable victims (e.g. one ill child) than about statistical victims (e.g. children with cancer). Our results suggest that having clearer expectations about the positive reactions that recipients may experience could help givers to strength the self-concept and self-esteem.

Consequently, giving away something that is divided between too many people may feel as if the action is not making a significant impact in each recipient.

Beside the amount available to be shared, the way in which the incentives were framed resulted to be relevant when predicting participants’ preferences. For

instance, giving the possibility of sharing a £2.5 voucher to purchase products in a coffee shop had a different effect on preferences compared to a situation in which a voucher for a biscuit (from the same store) worth £2.5 was made available for sharing with friends. It was particularly interesting to find that the Products framing (e.g. the biscuit worth £2.5) was more attractive than the Cash framing when the reward was expected to be shared with two people instead of one person; and therefore, each recipient would receive a smaller amount. We claim that this

happens because it is more socially acceptable to give away small in-kind gifts than small amounts in the form of cash. This result suggests that organisations that aim to promote schemes in which the incentives can be shared with others will benefit from making available in-kind gift to share with friends when the incentives available are expected to be small.

The manipulation of the Reward Framing previously mentioned was also expected to be closely linked to the measures capturing the perception of the potential reactions from friends after sharing part of a loyalty reward with them. Surprisingly, we found that the two variables were unrelated. A potential explanation is that the preferences for sharing gifts with others in the form of cash or in-kind gifts are more governed by social norms than by the anticipation of how friends consider the level of generosity of the customers. In other words, we have measured Expectations about Friend’s Reactions based on adjectives that assess whether friends would perceive customers like good and generous persons. However, it may be the case that measuring the extent to which friends were expected to see the customer like someone complying with what was socially acceptable in such situation (e.g. In which extent do you think your friend would consider that your gift is appropriate?) could produce a result closer to our prediction. However, we cannot be certain about this explanation; consequently, future studies can further explore this idea.

In addition to the size and framing of the reward, we hypothesised that the scale measuring FNE would be related to the preferences for the different types of loyalty schemes and also to the expectations regarding friends’ reactions after sharing the reward with them. Unexpectedly, neither relationship was found. The FNE scale was the only variable considered in the present study linked to personality traits, and not to contextual factors. Our results may indicate that the preferences for engaging in initiatives that allow the sharing of part of a reward with relevant peers rely more on contextual factors in which organisations can intervene than on a personality predisposition. However, this claim should be explored in future research by measuring different personality traits.

Equally unexpected was the general trend observed in participants’ first choices. Most of them selected, as their first alternative, the loyalty scheme in which customers kept the entire loyalty reward for themselves. That pattern was

surprising, considering that a significant proportion of the participants from the set of studies presented in Chapter 1 was willing to give away part of their loyalty reward in an experimental setting with comparable scenarios. In this sense, differences in the way participants’ preferences were measured may represent the source of variability. In the first two sets of experiments, preferences were measured by asking participants to state the specific amount of incentives that they were willing to share, or by presenting pairwise comparisons of different programs in which the proportions of the reward being given away was varied. These two methods

produced fairly similar trends, but different to the preference observed in the present study in which participants were asked to rank a variety of schemes.

Although the differences previously described may exist due to the way in which preferences were measured, we claim instead that such differences are a

loyalty reward in the present study. Specifically, friends were expected to receive a voucher from a coffee shop via e-mail on behalf of the customer (participant), representing the specific amount being shared. Even though participants were told that “No additional information, apart from the gift voucher, will be sent to the friend

by the shop“, there could still be concerns regarding the way in which retailers

managed private information (Demoulin & Zidda, 2009). In this regard, participants may refrain from sharing part of the loyalty reward not because they do not wish to do so but because they may expect recipients to be unhappy after realising that their personal email was given to a company. If that is the case, our data may be noisier and the effects weaker than we expected. For that reason, we anticipate that larger effects can be found in our experiment if the concerns about sharing private information, in this case the email, are controlled in future research.

In the present study, we did not establish hypotheses regarding the demographic information being measured. Nonetheless, we found a particularly curious link between participants’ income and the willingness to favour schemes in which part of the loyalty reward was shared with other people. Intuitively, we might assume that people with a higher income should be in a better economic position to give away economic resources, whereas those with more economic constraints should be more reluctant to share their endowments with others. Unexpectedly, we found that those with the lowest annual income were, indeed, the people less inclined to find attractive the “selfish” loyalty scheme in which no reward was shared; instead, they tended to favour more the “unselfish” loyalty programmes. This result is consistent with previous research arguing that people with less economic resources are more likely to engage in prosocial behaviours (Piff et al., 2010). We claim that our result can be explained, at least in part, by the differences in which people with different income expect their friends to react after sharing with them a small reward. Simply put, when poorer individuals give something away, we should expect recipients to

have a more positive reaction compared to a situation in which givers are richer because such action involves a bigger scarify by the poorest. Moreover, previous research (e.g. Aral & Walker, 2011b; Christakis & Fowler, 2007) has shown that social networks are characterised by homophily, in other words, a tendency to link with others of similar characteristics (including similar income). In this sense, we can assume that poorer people are more likely to imagine having friends of a similar economic status. Then, a poorer recipient (friend) should be expected to show more gratitude towards the giver than a richer recipient because the gift may be less valuable for the friend with more economic resources. That could explain why, in this context, lower income participants were more unselfish. Although this

explanation is aligned with other results from our experiment, it would be interesting to explore further our claim in future research.

A potential criticism of our study is that the decisions made by participants are not based on real incentives but related to hypothetical scenarios. In this regard, some studies have found that social preferences may change when participants are incentivised, and people will possibly be more selfish (Amir, Rand, & Gal, 2012; Buhren & Kundt, 2015; Dana, Weber, & Kuang, 2007). Nonetheless, other researchers claim that similar results can be found regardless of whether

participants’ decisions are incentivised; consequently, there is no basis to assume that the absence of incentive can make invalid the results from experiments

evaluating social preferences (Ben-Ner, Kramer, & Levy, 2008). Future studies may well explore whether the variables and principles tested in our experiment can behave in the same way when participants are incentivised.

In brief, the insights obtained in the present study regarding the motives driving people’s willingness to share an endowment with others represent an important contribution to the literature on prosocial behaviour. Moreover, proposing that such

motives can embody an opportunity to design more effective initiatives that encourage the adoption of products and behaviour is an idea that can potentially stimulate further research in marketing and the broader field of diffusion of innovations.