Before revision: Pay-it-forward reciprocity encourages the spread of prosocial behavior. However, existing empirical evidence of pay-it-forward behavior has been largely based on laboratory experiments, which are limited in sample size and external validity. Extending this research, our study uses a natural experiment to examine pay-it-forward reciprocity in a real-life context with a large-scale dataset of 3.4 million users of an online platform. Our natural experiment is enabled by the randomness in the mechanism that WeChat, a Chinese online social networking platform, uses to split an online monetary gift (also known as a "red packet") to its recipients.
After revision: Does receiving a gift encourage the recipient to send more gifts? Causal identification of behavioral contagion is very challenging, especially based on observational data from social networks. Given that the online monetary gift (also known as a "red packet") to its recipients.