Trouble in paradise? Collaboration behavior and ethics of micro-influencers in the hospitality industry

This research is to examine consumers' perceptions and responses to the exchange between social media micro-influencers and hospitality businesses in “collaboration” scenarios. Two studies are designed in series with qualitative and quantitative research methods. Study I uses YouTube comments to identify four dimensions of people's ethical perceptions of social media micro-influencers collaboration behavior. Study II follows up and designs a 2 × 2 experiment to empirically examine consumers' cognitive and behavioral responses to micro-influencers collaboration behavior. Findings of this study indicate that consumers tend to dislike micro-influencer's “collaboration” behavior, though their responses differ between the four scenarios designed in the study. In particular, micro-influencer's comments (positive or negative) have more salient impacts on consumers' responses to micro-influencers, compared with business owners' responses to the collaboration behavior (accept or decline). It considers the transformative impacts of social media and the collaboration phenomenon in hospitality settings, and extends the application of equity theory by including the third party's perspectives of social media users.