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Online influencer marketing (OIM) has been growing rapidly in recent years, and user-generated content (UGC) platforms rely significantly on OIM. Thus, there is a need to explore the interactions between platforms and influencers. We develop and analyze a game-theoretic model including one UGC platform and one influencer, in which the platform sets a payment to motivate the influencer's video production, and the influencer decides his efforts in both video production and OIM activity. This paper innovatively formalises a sequential platform-influencer game with one platform wage for videos and revenue sharing on OIM while the influencer chooses two effort variables, and derives closed-form threshold conditions that generate a nonmonotonic relationship between the commission share and the platform's payment and profit. We find that as the OIM commission share increases, the platform's payment first increases and then decreases, especially when video profitability is high. When the platform's commission share is low and the influencer's effort costs are high, a higher value of OIM for subscribers may lead to lower platform payments. Moreover, video profitability can mitigate the dependence between the OIM commission share and platform's profit. That is, when video profitability is low (high), a larger commission share promotes (reduces) the platform's profit.
Gao et al. (Thu,) studied this question.