In this paper, we propose a new neural network architecture for item recommendation with structural information. Our model, structural neural recommender (SNR) is based on neural networks and operates on a hierarchy paradigm, aiming to explore the effectiveness of incorporating different structural information for recommendation. Many recent state-of-the-art neural network based recommendation models exploit the nonlinear transformations for modeling the complex user-item interaction patterns and user historical behaviors, ignoring the item-item structural relationship. This structural information, however, is uncomplicated to derive and useful for inferring item characteristics. To utilize this information, SNR simultaneously learns representation from user-item interactions and item-item relationships. Empirical studies on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating such structural information, by outperforming classic and recent baselines. We also conduct detail ablation studies and hyper-parameter analysis to provide further understanding towards the behaviors of our model. Following the model development, we conduct a field experiment to demonstrate that the effectiveness of algorithmic recommender systems can further increase by using different types of message framing when communicating recommendations to consumers. Our results suggest that recommendations framed with a relevance appeal (e.g. “Top 5 brands for you”) are more effective in general, yet recommendations that are framed with a popularity appeal (“Top 5 most popular brands”) are more effective for customers who were acquired via social media (versus non-social media) advertising or for those who have stronger (versus weaker) social orientation.

In recent years, leading digital technology companies have shown a strong interest in enabling children to send electronic word of mouth (eWOM). Recasting children from passive to active participants in marketing communications, this shift expands children’s marketing practices from how a company influences children via traditional marketing communications to how children influence a company’s marketing practices through eWOM. This paper aims to enhance our understanding about the use of children’s eWOM in marketing communications when children’s eWOM and children’s marketing begin to intersect. The eWOM literature demonstrated the effects of eWOM on product sales without identifying the sender (King, Racherla, & Bush, 2014). The extension of the effects from aggregated sender to children needs careful study in light of children’s marketing literature which showed children have distinct characteristics in the context of traditional marketing (Cross, 2002). In this study, we examine the positive expectation of business impact that explains firms’ adoption of children’s eWOM and further investigate the normative concerns about the social influence of children’s eWOM.