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Over the last two decades, medical libraries have shifted from being careful suppliers of health information for consumers and patients to taking on prominent roles in outreach initiatives. The emerging livestreaming technology provides opportunities for medical libraries to disseminate health information and facilitate dialogues between health professionals and the public. This article presents a case study of Fudan University Medical Library's innovative approach to health information outreach through livestreaming. By leveraging the expertise of health professionals and embracing the livestreaming technologies, the library successfully engaged a broad audience, surpassing the limitations of traditional outreach methods. Based on the case, the article discusses the transformative potential of livestreaming in reshaping health information outreach and promoting health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourism live streaming can significantly enhance users' desire to travel. Although previous studies have identified many technical and social enablers influencing users' impulsive travel intention, limited research has examined it from a socio‐technical perspective. This paper aims to develop and validate a theoretical model that explains how visibility, personalization, and metavoicing influence impulsive travel intention through parasocial relationship in tourism live streaming. Empirical results (N = 551) reveal that visibility, personalization, and metavoicing exert both direct positive impacts on impulsive travel intention and indirect effects through the mediation of parasocial relationship. This paper also identifies gender as a moderating role in the proposed model. This paper enriches the literature by not only shedding light on the underlying process through which users develop impulsive travel intention, considering both technical features and social interaction but also stands as one of the earliest to investigate the gender's moderating role in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how online social interactions in live streaming environments impact e-commerce sales. Topics include the influence of observed action signals & live chat volume on sales revenue; interaction effects of various social signals; the role of moderation factors such as likes and product variety; and discusses the nature of social signals & their interactions significantly affect sales outcomes, providing actionable insights for optimizing live streaming e-commerce strategies.

We present perspectives from 10 autistic Twitch streamers regarding their experiences as livestreamers and how autism uniquely colors their experiences. Livestreaming offers a social online experience distinct from in-person, face-to-face communication, where autistic people tend to encounter challenges. Our reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with 10 participants showcases autistic livestreamers' perspectives in their own words. Our findings center on the importance of having streamers establishing connections with other, sharing autistic identities, controlling a space for social interaction, personal growth, and accessibility challenges. In our discussion, we highlight the crucial value of having a medium for autistic representation, as well as design opportunities for streaming platforms to onboard autistic livestreamers and to facilitate livestreamers communication with their audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how empathy towards livestream sellers influences the success of livestream shopping and the role of co-experience among viewers. Topics include the mechanisms of empathy in livestream sales; the impact of co-experience on viewer empathy; cultural differences in livestream shopping performance between China and the U.S.; and the study finds that empathy significantly affects purchase intentions, with co-experience playing a crucial role in fostering this empathy.

The article focuses on investigating the role of customer motivation and social presence in live streaming services, particularly among different customer types. It addresses how the motivations and behaviors of buyers and watchers in live streaming differ and how social presence influences their adoption of the service. The study reveals that customer type affects perceived enjoyment and usefulness, with watchers valuing these aspects more than buyers in the live streaming.

Government officials in more than half of the poverty-stricken counties in China have recently helped sell local specialty products through e-commerce live streaming platforms. Yet it is little understood if such practice reduces poverty and boosts the local economy by encouraging local entrepreneurship. We conduct an empirical investigation and find that government officials' participation in e-commerce live streaming is associated with an increase in the online presence of local special products and stores, a manifestation of rising entrepreneurship and shaking off poverty. In addition, the effects of government officials' participation in live streaming are more pronounced in economically and technologically under-developed areas, suggesting that they help mitigate inequality. Our findings contribute to the intersection of ICT for development, poverty alleviation, and entrepreneurship and highlight the value of a public-private partnership that integrates government participation (the top-down approach) and market behaviors (the bottom-up approach) in poverty alleviation through entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Livestream technology is transforming consumers’ online shopping experience. This research addresses how livestream selling platforms mitigates the tension between streamers’ constrained service capacity and individual service demands with AI assistants. We conduct a large-scale field experiment where in the consumers in the treatment group have access to an AI assistant that predicts consumers’ potential needs and provides individualized services, while the consumers in the control group do not have access to such an AI assistant. We find that the introduction of the AI assistant increases sales by 2.61%and reduces product returns by 62.86%. Our models on multiple-stage purchase decision-making reveal that an AI assistant increases the duration of the awareness and consideration stages, improves the probability of placing an order in the evaluation stage and reduces the likelihood of product returns. Further, our analyses reveal that interacting with the AI assistant also reduces consumers’ expressions of affection and positive emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the impact of network structure on two important business outcomes of the PWYW (Pay-What-You-Want) live streaming platform, namely live chat, and tipping. Specifically, we investigate the role of network embeddedness on these outcomes by analyzing 9,524,420 transaction-broadcast records from 1,334,999 users of a leading PWYW live streaming platform in South Korea. Our analysis sheds light on how user contributions in the form of tipping and live chat change because of the extent of content consumption overlaps. Our preliminary results suggest that higher levels of network embeddedness lead to increased tipping and decreased live chatting. These findings have important implications for platform designers and streamers, as they highlight the need to consider consumption patterns across users in the design of PWYW live streaming platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the cultural uniqueness of China, swift guanxi has been demonstrated as a substantial factor in directing purchase intention in social commerce. Although many studies examined swift guanxi in livestreaming shopping, the majority of the studies were conducted using a cross-sectional design, suffering from shortages in which no understanding of the long-term causal effect of swift guanxi and its antecedents. The purpose of this study is to examine how swift guanxi has a continuous long-term effect on purchase intention. In addition, how streamers' characteristics (i.e. attractiveness, expertise) and social interaction (i.e., WOM) affect swift guanxi over a period of time. A conceptual model is developed and empirically tested based on four waves of a longitudinal survey of viewers who have repeated watching experiences for the same live-streaming shopping program. This study contributes to increasing the validity of the research model concerning swift guanxi in the context of live-streaming shopping using the longitudinal design, where the relative effects on swift guanxi are empirically compared over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live streaming commerce has gained considerable traction in recent years, which transforms the traditional online shopping experience by enabling real-time interactions between streamers and customers with the leverage of live streaming technology. While existing studies have suggested that live streaming selling could enhance sales by increasing customers’ purchase intentions, scant research has confirmed this effect with large-scale empirical sales data. Additionally, extant literature failed to distinguish between the immediate and long-term impact of live steaming on product sales. Based on the data collected from Amazon Live and Amazon.com, this study examines the immediate and long-term influence of live streaming on product sales. By using discontinuous growth modeling, the preliminary results show that product sales will increase immediately after live streaming selling, but will have a declining trend in a long run, strongly supporting our hypotheses. These findings can provide significant theoretical and practical implications for live streaming commerce operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live streaming has changed the way people shop, and it is becoming increasingly popular for male streamers to endorse female products. However, the mechanism of how male streamers attract female consumers to watch and purchase remains to be understudied. This study attempts to investigate the success factors of male streamers. Based on indepth interviews with 21 female and thorough literature review, we categorize male streamers' source attractiveness into five dimensions (physical attractiveness, voice attractiveness, verbal attractiveness, femininity and masculinity). A research model that explains how these attractiveness influence consumers' behavioral intentions is proposed and validate with a sample of 234 female consumers. The findings confirm the effects of all the dimensions, although they affect consumers' behavioral intention by changing their levels of pleasure and arousal through different mechanisms. This research advances our understanding of the interpersonal attraction caused by gender differences in e-commerce live streaming selling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, live streaming has emerged as a new type of platform that allows streamers and viewers to interact in real time. Viewers can enjoy the streamers' performances and reward the streamers with tips. Previous research has shown that streamers' emotions have a significant impact on viewers' tips. Drawing on the literature on psychological well-being and emotion regulation, we extend previous research by investigating how streamer emotion diversity affects viewer tips. Using a unique dataset from a live streaming platform and applying video analytics, we find that streamer emotion diversity is positively associated with viewer tips. We further examine the moderating effect of streamer experience. We find that the effect of emotional diversity is stronger for the more experienced streamers. Our research also provides important implications to both researchers and practitioners. Include your abstract here followed by the keywords as indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social live streaming services (SLSS) have gained widespread popularity globally, placing a strong emphasis on viewers' social experiences. As the performance of streamers in SLSS relies on virtual gifting and visit duration, it becomes crucial to explore the impact of social experiences and how they are cultivated within SLSS context. Moreover, the role of personal predispositions of both streamers and viewers has not been fully considered. Drawing from social presence theory and para-social interaction, this study aims to establish and empirically examine a theoretical framework that elucidates: (1) the effects of social experiences (i.e., para-social interaction and sense of belonging) on viewer behavior in SLSS, (2) the effects of social presence on social experiences, (3) the moderation roles of user predispositions (i.e., viewer loneliness and streamer physical attraction). Through the analysis of data obtained from survey responses, the research findings contribute to our understanding of viewer behavior in SLSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing live streaming technology for product promotion has become an emerging trend in e-commerce. However, in the fashion industry, little is known how about fashion retailers can leverage streamers' visual and auditory activities in live streaming videos to boost sales performance of fashion products. Drawing on the emotional design model, we empirically investigate how visceral design elements (e.g., background color consistency and background music) and behavioral design elements (e.g., interactive distance and scene description) can influence fashion sales. Using a large and unique product-level dataset from Taobao Live, the largest LSE platform in China, we will employ text analytics and computer vision techniques to extract these design elements from streaming videos. The effects of the proposed design elements on product sales will then be quantified using econometric models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Driving streaming commitment from individual streamers is critical to the sustainable growth of live streaming platforms, and platform operators tend to apply incentives to motivate streamers for such voluntary content contributions. However, most monetary incentives have an unintended impact on reducing the intrinsic motivation of streamers, resulting in fewer efforts and less commitment to streaming productions. This study explores the effect of a novel goal incentive design based on viewer reciprocal support. Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment, we estimate the causal impact of the incentive scheme using the combination of a coarsened exact matching (CEM) approach with the difference-in-differences (DID) model. Our results confirm that the goal incentive based on viewer reciprocal support could positively drive streamers' efforts in live streaming. This paper contributes to the literature on driving user generated content in emerging digital platforms and offers important implications for streaming platform operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capturing consumers' motivations for using the live streaming shopping platform (LSSP) can help guide the optimization of the platform and enhance shopping experience of consumers while watching live videos. Previous studies on user motivation typically explored technical and psychological antecedents of usage by considering the platform holistically. However, this black-box like treatment to the platform blurs the finergrained details of consumer usage. This study takes a micro-level approach, disassembling the LSSP into 13 representative design features, and refines nine user motivations based on the uses and gratifications theory. Through collecting 237 questionnaires and employing regression analysis, we reveal the nuanced relationship between platform design features and consumer motivations. Our findings show that different design features are driven by distinct motivations, diverging from overall LSSP usage motivations. This research broadens the scope of LSSP studies, improves platform functionality, and offers practical insights for service providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live stream consumption, spanning very diverse topics from video games to real-life streams, live coding, and political discussions, has surged in popularity across various demographics. Besides making it possible to consume content, platforms such as Twitch also enable consumers to financially support streamers and their streams in various ways, for example through monthly subscriptions, virtual currencies like Twitch Bits or gifted subscriptions to other users. This study conceptualizes each live stream chat as a unique micro community and focuses on the latter form of financial support. We build a bridge between chat and financial support data of more than 100,000 Twitch live streams and generosity through gifted subscriptions to explore why some streams seem to foster generosity more than others. Ultimately, this study sheds light on the design of online social network features that promote the actualization of the affordance of generosity within online communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand viewers' sense of community in the live streaming environment, this research synthesizes media synchronicity theory and sense of community theory to develop a theoretical framework. We aim to examine the antecedents and consequences of the sense of community in live streaming platforms. We expect that viewers' actual communication purpose (e.g., conveyance or convergence) will influence viewers' sense of community in the live streaming context and further impact their activities in traditional third-party online communities. We first use experiments to validate the mechanism in our theoretical model and then collect observational data from Twitch, a popular live streaming platform, to test our hypotheses. Our results will provide theoretical contributions to the live streaming, online community, and communication literature. Our findings will provide practical implications for streamers in the live streaming platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live streaming has become increasingly popular in recent years for users to broadcast live events or experiences to an online audience in real-time. With the prevalence of the metaverse, virtual idols appear on the stage of live streaming. Unlike real human streamers, virtual idols are computer-generated avatars whose appearance does not exist in the physical world. Though existing literature has documented the effect of emotional displays of human streamers on viewers’ behavior, whether emotional displays of avatar streamers affect viewers’ behavior, especially viewers’ consumption behavior has not yet been explored. To fill this gap, we focus on the live streaming of virtual idols and conduct deep learning approaches to investigate the emotional synchrony between avatar streamers and their viewers based on moment-tomoment data. Our analysis of large-scale video data shows that the larger the discrepancy between the streamers’ acoustic- and text- emotions, the more likely the viewers will pay. This study sheds light on how avatars can be designed to leverage emotion to engage viewers in more consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of the live streaming industry, streamers are facing stiff competition. While there is a common perception that loyalty generates more profits for the firm, there is also conflicting evidence that loyal customers may not be charged more. The live streaming context provides an ideal setting to empirically examine the value of loyal customers and offers a new dimension for measuring behavioral loyalty. Our results suggest that customers with higher consumption loyalty generally pay less while those with higher social loyalty tend to voluntarily pay more. Moreover, there is a crowding-out effect for the same type of resources and a compensation effect between different types of resources concerning the relationship between historical and current inputs. Theoretical explanations drawn on the social exchange theory and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live streaming has become an important feature on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. More and more entrepreneurs (content creators) are competing in live streaming platforms like Twitch to maximize the attention they receive from consumers (viewers). In this competitive landscape, it is crucial for entrepreneurs to develop and provide new compelling content that can maximize the consumers’ attention and aid the discovery of their content. We adopt an exploration-exploitation framework and assess the four strategies these new entrepreneurs could use to attract viewership and position themselves on Twitch: exploration, exploitation, learning from viewers, and their neighbor streamers. We combined the natural language processing techniques with theory-driven measures to accomplish this. Using our proposed measures, we estimate the utility of consumers from these different strategies using the discrete choice demand model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of the live streaming industry has introduced a novel digital entertainment environment and laid the foundation for advancing research in a relatively untouched space. Co-broadcasting is an increasingly popular type of live event where streamers teamed together to co-create content on a shared screen. Balancing between competition and collaboration, co-broadcasting resembles a coopetitive activity where streamers collaborate to deliver entertaining content while cultivating a competitive atmosphere to spur viewer engagement simultaneously. In turn, such streamer-viewer dynamics have given rise to ample opportunities for research. To this end, we advance a research agenda for co-broadcasting that distinguishes among competition, collaboration, and coopetition perspectives in putting forth knowledge gaps pertinent to each perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PK events, where two streamers are paired to compete for virtual gifts received in a given time, serve as an important source of revenue for Chinese live streaming platforms. Building on rivalry theory, we aim to elucidate the role of rivalry in enhancing viewers’ gifting behaviors for PK events. Specifically, we posit similarity, repeated competition, and competitiveness as the antecedents of rivalry of dyadic competitive relationships, which in turn influences viewers’ virtual gifting behaviors in support of their favored live streamer. To validate the hypothesized relationships, secondary data on PK events were collected from a leading live streaming platform. Findings from this study not only expand on extant literature by scrutinizing how rivalry arises on digital entertainment platforms where competitions are devised for increasing the exposure of entertainers, but also inform practitioners on how to match live streamers for PK events to maximize rivalry and viewers’ gifting behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In live streaming industry, there is a growing number of PK events where a PK team consists of two streamers who jointly complete a competitive session. However, it has not been widely investigated on the mechanism through which the composition of a PK team influences viewers' gifting behavior. This study proposes the diversity of a PK team can influence the level of virtual gifting in a PK event. Moreover, the moderating effect of pairwise PK repetition is investigated. To test our hypotheses, PK records (N=31,140) were collected and analyzed from a leading Chinses live streaming platform. Analytical results attested to the positive effect of diversity attributes and a negative effect of PK repetition, while the moderating effect of PK repetition was proved to be statistically significant. Discussion and implications are provided to enrich the current studies on live streaming platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-pandemic "new normal" has accelerated and expanded the digital footprints of both the consumers and the businesses that are serving them. The devastated tourism industry finds its hope for survival and revival in the trending live streaming (LS) phenomenon. While it becomes a challenge for travellers to visit the attractions and sites in person and experience them, the LS digital applications could bring them to their handsets in real-time. Drawing on the existing literature, this research follows the design science research methodology to investigate the LS digital technology trend for an engaging tourism experience, to understand its processes for both asynchronous and synchronous streaming services. It describes its process components and twentytwo attributes in seven categories and models its framework for a gratifying live streaming experience (LSX). Real world cases from the tourism and social media industries are drawn on to validate the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live streaming platforms, such as Twitch and Youtube Live, have become the most prevalent user-generated content platforms globally. Despite the prevalence, scholars and practitioners have spent much effort exploring the engagement pattern and the culture of live streaming communities. In this paper, we investigate the effect of video quality and streamers' emotional expression on real-time viewership. We first propose a context-aware deep learning model to identify the camera frame and extract video quality and emotion traits from live streaming videos with state-of-art computer vision implementations. We then empirically examine the correlation between the proposed measures and real-time viewership. The preliminary result suggests that live streaming users generally prefer live streaming content with more pleasant valence, less thrilling elements, and "warm" colors. This research takes the first step to examine live streaming videos with the sectional settings and significantly contributes to the live streaming literature from both theoretical and technical perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live streaming selling is a technology-enabled business model that profoundly changed the landscape of e-commerce. However, there is limited understanding of how to help streamers improve their sales performance. This study examines whether and how providing real-time sales information can influence sales performance through a largescale randomized field experiment in cooperation with Alibaba Group. In the experiment, a streamer is randomly assigned to the treatment group (access to real-time sales information for presale products) or the control group (cannot access real-time sales information for presale products). We find that the sales of presale products in the treatment group increased by about 20% compared with presale products in the control group. Besides, the observed effect is likely driven by the increase in sales efficiency and conditions on streamers' popularity and usage behavior. Our research provides implications for the live streaming platforms on the economic value of analytics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online synchronous platforms, such as live streaming, spend tremendous efforts engaging users in a real-time setting, which has gained considerable popularity very recently. While the existing literature finds that the group size of peers positively affects user engagement on asynchronous platforms, the effect of group size remains unexplored in the context of synchronous streaming. In this work, we leverage the unique raid functionality, an exogenous increase in live streaming viewers, and empirically examine how group size affects users' real-time commenting engagement. Collecting and analyzing chat history in 13,382 playbacks on Twitch, our result suggests that existing viewers (users who engage in the live streaming channel before the raid) tend to engage less after the raid. The findings in this paper indicate a negative effect of group size on viewer engagement in the synchronous communication setting, which theoretically extends the prior literature in user engagement and crowd effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live streaming selling is a transformative e-commerce channel that features real-time interaction between a streamer and a mass audience. However, streamers' service capacities cannot fulfill viewers' needs for social interaction, resulting in a loss of viewer engagement and financial gains. Accordingly, we examine whether the implementation of an AI assistant that tracks, understands, and responds to viewers' requests can facilitate social interaction and drive viewers' purchase decision. In collaboration with Taobao.com, we conducted a randomized field experiment on its live streaming platform. In the experiment, a subject was either assigned to the treatment group with an AI assistant in each live streaming or the control group in which the AI assistant was absent. We will collect data to evaluate the effectiveness of the AI assistant. Our research contributes to the literature on the business value of AI applications and live streaming while implicates AI system designs for live streaming platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live streaming is transforming how people use social media due to its real-time interaction, improvised content co-creation and unique traffic monetization. However, limited research attention has been paid to such a new social media-enabled business model. This research investigates what factors may affect viewers' purchase intention of virtual gifts in live streaming based on flow theory and swift guanxi. Moreover, the moderating role of free items is considered. The research model developed will be tested using Structural Equation Modeling based on survey data collected in China. The proposed relationships will be examined under different types of live streaming. Our study extends the understanding to the theory of flow by taking the effects of swiftly formed interpersonal relationship (i.e. swift guanxi) and free items into account. The results can be used by platforms and streamers to improve their practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The combination of live streaming video and e-commerce promises to revolutionize the retail industry and consumer shopping habits. However, it remains unclear how and to what extent live streaming influences online sales and review participation. We obtain an archival data set from Alibaba’s Taobao (an early adopter and leader in China’s live commerce marketing) and employ difference-in-difference-in-differences in tandem with propensity score matching to evaluate the causal effect of live streaming on the performances of online sellers, including sales volume and review participation rate. Our results show that adopting live streaming significantly drives sales and increase feedback. Besides, we found there is a positive spillover effect of live streaming on the online sales of non-live-demonstration products. This suggests that live streaming is not only a format of product presentation, but also an effective relationship marketing tool for online sellers. The findings provide distinct theoretical contributions and managerial implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of 4K videos has grown significantly in the past fewyears. Yet coding and streaming live 4K videos incurs prohibitive cost to the network and end system. Motivated by this observation, we explore the feasibility of supporting live 4K video streaming over wireless networks using commodity devices. Given the high data rate requirement of 4K videos, 60 GHz is appealing, but its large and unpredictable throughput fluctuation makes it hard to provide desirable user experience. In particular, to support live 4K video streaming, we should (i) adapt to highly variable and unpredictable wireless throughput, (ii) support efficient 4K video coding on commodity devices. To this end, we propose a novel system, Jigsaw. It consists of (i) easy-to-compute layered video coding to seamlessly adapt to unpredictable wireless link fluctuations, (ii) efficient GPU implementation of video coding on commodity devices, and (iii) effectively leveraging both WiFi and WiGig through delayed video adaptation and smart scheduling. Using real experiments and emulation, we demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our system. Our results show that it improves PSNR by 6-15dB and improves SSIM by 0.011-0.217 over state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, even when throughput fluctuates widely between 0.2Gbps-2Gbps, it can achieve an average PSNR of 33dB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social live streaming services (SLSS) is becoming popular worldwide for its real-time interaction and successful commercial model. Therefore, it is important to understand user’s gifting behavior on SLSS. Yet it is not explored clearly. From an identity investment perspective, this research studies how class identity and relational identity would impact user’s gifting choices (i.e., consuming amount and number). Based on the identity signaling theory, this study also explores the moderating role of social density elicited by real-time comments. The theoretical framework is tested on 232, 416 individual data collected on Douyu platform. This research contributes not only to the online gifting review literature by revealing different effects of user’s multiple identities on gifting behavior, but also to identity signaling theory by identifying the moderating consequences of social density as rooted in social environments, which provides valuable implications on how to promote sales of virtual gifts on SLSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live streaming has become extraordinarily popular worldwide. As a new form of social media, live streaming enables two levels of real-time interactions (i.e., between viewers and the streamer, and among viewers) and is monetized in a new way-viewers' purchase of virtual gifts. The new monetization model has achieved a great success, yet there is a lack of understanding about what encourages viewers to purchase virtual gifts in live streaming. To explain such purchase behavior, this study develops a model which investigates the roles of viewers' holistic experience with the system (i.e., cognitive absorption) and their social experiences (i.e., para-social interaction and virtual crowd experience), as well as how these experiences are developed within the technological environment of live streaming (i.e., interactivity, deep profiling and design aesthetics). The model was validated by using survey data collected from China. We also discuss implications for research and practice emerging out of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live streaming platforms such as Amazon's Twitch and YouTube Live have rapidly grown by taking advantage of unprecedented real-time interactivity between content creators and viewers. While numerous researchers suggested that viewer-streamer interactions and relationships are significantly associated with viewer donation, which is the main business model of live streaming, the economic impact of these relationships has not been quantified perhaps due to a lack of relevant data. In this paper, we measured the impact of cross-gender relationships between viewers and streamers on viewer contributions by using a rich dataset from the largest live streaming platform in South Korea. After controlling several viewerand streamer-specific characteristics, we found that viewers donate larger amount of money to the opposite gender streamers by 4.4 percent than the same gender streamers. We also revealed that relational motivation positively moderates preferences for the opposite gender. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on examining how the technological affordances of virtual avatar live streamers impact the flow experience and in-app purchase intentions in live stream e-commerce. The study identifies the characteristics of technological affordances such as modality, agency, interactivity, and navigability that enhance the flow experience and the research contributes to understanding the potential of virtual avatar live streamers in creating interactive and engaging shopping experiences.

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Recently, live streaming, as a primary social media trend, has become more and more commonplace in businesses' social media marketing. For live streaming platforms, how to keep viewers stay is always the central issue. To better predict viewer's behaviors, we study a watching duration prediction problem in this paper. Different from prior literature, we take interactions between viewers and anchors into consideration and develop an integrated modeling framework for the prediction task. The proposed interaction-aware model combines probabilistic matrix factorization model with deep learning model to extract useful features from interactions for collaborative prediction. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first one to analyze interactive behaviors for video watching prediction. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted on a real-world dataset to evaluate our predictive model. Experimental results demonstrate that our new model significantly outperforms baselines in watching duration prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of live streaming in popular culture, it has begun to attract interest from the research community. Despite recent research focusing on understanding the behaviors of people engaging live streaming and motivations behind them, we know little about how live streaming affects commercial aspects of modern life. In this paper, we employ two matching methods with difference-in-difference (DID) approach to establish a causal relationship between the adoption of live streaming strategy by online retailers and online product sales. Both results indicate that adopting live streaming strategy significantly boosts online product sales. This work is the first empirical study, to the best of our knowledge, that quantifies the effect of adopting live streaming strategy on online sales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]