Can Reward Uncertainty Encourage Social Referrals? Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment

Social referral programs, in which individuals recommend products or services within their networks in return for rewards, have been widely adopted across digital platforms. This study explores the impact of incorporating uncertainty into the rewards of such programs, focusing on how senders and recipients perceive and react to uncertain rewards. We run a randomized experiment involving more than 160,000 users of a telecommunications operator in China and examine the effectiveness of different r