The Impact of Endogenous Influencer Marketing on Performance of Community-Driven Online Auctions

The consumer-to-consumer online auction market has seen phenomenal growth, with a significant shift in economic activity towards online automotive auctions. Yet, with vehicle sales going down, online auction platforms are struggling to keep their communities engaged and active. One such platform (Cars&Bids) is leveraging the influence of internal figure Doug DeMuro, founder and social media influencer, to bolster user engagement and auction performance. To explain the effect of such influencer, endogenous to the platform, we rely on the theoretical principals of resource mobilization and relational hearing. To test the proposed hypothesis, we collected a panel dataset of N = 1300 vehicles auctioned from 2020 to 2024. To estimate the focal effect, we leverage difference-in-difference and coarsened exact matching. Our findings suggest that endogenous influencer effect can significantly impact user engagement, manifested in increased viewership and commenting, and auction performance, reflected in higher number of bids and final price achieved.