On the morning of June 11, 2025, CUFE Business School successfully held the 15th Session of 2025 Excellent Academic Forum in Conference Room 615 of the Main Teaching Building at the Xueyuan South Road Campus. Assistant Professor Zhao Pu was invited as the keynote speaker for this lecture. Teachers and postgraduate students of CUFE Business School participated in the event.
The lecture was hosted by Assistant Professor Wei Chuang from the Marketing Department of CUFE Business School. Before the lecture started, Assistant Professor Wei briefly introduced Assistant Professor Zhao Pu's background. Zhao Pu is an Assistant Professor in the Marketing Department of Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a Bachelor of Arts and Science degree in three majors: Mathematics, Economics, and Political Science. In 2024, he graduated from Boston University with a Doctor of Business Administration degree (majoring in Marketing). Dr. Zhao Pu's research fields mainly include the design and optimization of quantitative marketing strategies, the design and regulation of digital platforms, with a particular focus on the decision-making trade-offs among three parties: creators, consumers, and the platforms themselves in the digital platform ecosystem.
The theme of Assistant Professor Zhao Pu's lecture was "Referral Marketing in the Creator Economy". Referral marketing is being adopted by more and more creators, aiming to incentivize existing subscribers to acquire new customers through referral rewards. This study focuses on the design of a referral mechanism where creators have autonomy over pricing and referral decisions. It quantifies the financial impact of referral marketing through a structural model. Using a unique panel dataset from a Chinese creator platform (covering 1,755 creators over a 39-month period), the study found that:
A 1% increase in referral rewards leads to an average 0.78% increase in new subscribers;
When creators release highly exclusive content (only visible to subscribers of the creator), simply increasing referral rewards does not significantly increase referred subscribers;
For every 1% increase in creators' profits, the relative probability of choosing a higher referral percentage decreases by 0.96%.
The structural model of the study has strong universality and can adapt to the pricing and referral decisions of creators under different popular referral mechanism designs in the market. In the counterfactual analysis, the current decentralized referral mechanism design was compared with two platform-driven designs: fixed referral percentage and fixed referral reward amount. The study found that under platform-driven designs, creators are less willing to adopt referral programs and will lower subscription prices to attract subscribers; at the same time, platform revenue increases significantly, highlighting the mismatch between creators' goal of profit maximization and platforms' goal of revenue maximization.
After the lecture, teachers and students present conducted in-depth discussions on topics such as paper writing and research data around the theme shared by Assistant Professor Zhao Pu, further deepening the exchange between academia and practice.
The "Excellent Academic Forum" is an academic exchange platform established by CUFE Business School to fulfill its mission of "contributing new management knowledge". It aims to focus on cutting-edge theoretical issues in the field of business administration and organizational development dilemmas in Chinese enterprise management practice, gather cutting-edge ideas and innovative perspectives at home and abroad, and explore Chinese solutions for China's social and economic development.
