Maggie Wenjing Liu

Tsinghua University

In the evermore thriving creator economy, content recommendation algorithms play a crucial role in determining what is relevant and popular on social media platforms. In response, many creators have developed various practices to take advantage of these algorithms. One novel and prevalent practice is explicitly seeking help from algorithms in the posts, such as saying, “Algorithms please show this to young women.” Across seven studies (including a field study, a large-scale social survey, and five online experiments, two pre-registered), we consistently find that this practice can harm actual consumer responses and marketing outcomes, deviating from what the creators originally intended. This occurs because consumers perceive creators seeking help from algorithms as implementing platform optimization, and infer intentionality from their actions. Furthermore, we identify the purpose of seeking help as a key moderator, whereby the negative effect of this practice is attenuated when creators do so for others’ interests (vs. self-interest). This research not only contributes to research on creators’ algorithm-leveraging practices, platform optimization, and inferred creator intentionality, but also offers insights into how creators can leverage algorithms more wisely.

Maggie Wenjing Liu is a Tenured Associate Professor of Marketing and Chair of Academic Seminars in the Marketing Department at the School of Economics and Management (SEM), Tsinghua University. She is the Associate Dean of Institute for Cultural Economy, Tsinghua University, and the Associate Director of Computational and Behavioral Science Lab of Tsinghua SEM. She received her Ph.D. in Marketing from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Her research interests include consumer behaviors, product and service experience, decision science, and pricing. She has published in leading academic journals such as Production and Operations Management, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Consumer Psychology,  INFORMS Journal on Computing, Marketing Letters, and Journal of International Marketing, and chaired multiple research projects, including 4 National Natural Science Foundation Funds of China (3 General Projects and 1 Youth Project). She is the AE for Journal of Marketing Science and serves on the Editorial Review Boards of Marketing Letters, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, and Editorial Advisory Board of Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing.