Two Streams to Success: Unpacking the Informational and Relational Roles of Live Streaming in Online Shopping
研究电商采用直播对产品销量的影响，区分产品导向与非产品导向两种直播策略，发现前者通过提供信息减少不确定性，后者通过客户关系管理提升销量。
The growing prominence of live streaming has attracted the attention from both e-commerce practitioners and the research community. This paper investigates the impact of online retailers adopting live streaming technology in business operations on their product sales, dissecting dual roles of live streaming: information provision and customer relationship management. Leveraging multiple archival data sources, we combine econometrics with deep learning to analyze the nuanced, dual roles of live streaming in online retail. Specifically, we develop a novel deep-learning framework to identify two types of live streaming strategies, product-oriented and nonproduct-oriented, and find that both strategies significantly increase online product sales. Notably, our research suggests that past review volume and product visual informativeness substitute the impact of using product-oriented live streaming; whereas seller's rating and product visual informativeness complement the impact of using nonproduct-oriented live streaming. These results suggest that product-oriented live streaming increases sales by reducing product uncertainty via information provision, whereas nonproduct-oriented live streaming increases sales via noninformation mechanisms, such as enhancing customer relationship management.