Investigating The Socio-Economic Values Of Broadcasters' Expressive Behaviors, Social Operations, And Selling Operations In Live Streaming Entertainment And E-Commerce
Dr Huang Ke-Wei, Associate Professor, School of Computing
Abstract:
With recent advances in mobile technologies (i.e., 4G and 5G, high-quality mobile cameras), live streaming that can be produced and consumed on mobile devices has taken the world by storm. By enabling synchronized video communications, live streaming not only reshapes the production and consumption of video content but also facilitates user interactions in many online environments. Despite that this booming phenomenon has given rise to a growing body of research, scant effort has been made to study the socio-economic values of broadcasters’ behaviors, actions, and/or operations in the ongoing communication process in live streaming. Therefore, this dissertation conducts two empirical studies to fill in this knowledge gap by examining how broadcasters’ expressive behaviors and operational decisions during real-time video streaming affect viewership and consumer outcomes in live streaming entertainment and e-commerce.
Study 1 examines the role of broadcasters’ expressive behaviors in affecting viewership engagement in terms of gift-sending behaviors in the context of social mobile live streaming (SMLS). Although prior media consumption literature has identified a body of antecedents of viewers’ perceptions and engagements, little attention has been given to media personas’ expressive behaviors which can convey rich and subtle interpersonal information and thus influence social outcomes in human interactions. The aim of Study 1 is hence to investigate the underexplored but critical role of broadcasters’ expressive behaviors in influencing viewers’ gift-sending engagements. Drawing on social psychological theories of interpersonal communication, Study 1 specifically focuses on two important aspects of broadcasters’ expressive behaviors – visual expressiveness and emotion transitions. By utilizing live streaming videos and viewers’ gift-sending data from a mobile-based social live streaming application, we algorithmically extract the features of human visual displays and facial emotions with computer vision techniques and empirically quantify their effects on virtual gifts given using multi-level mixed-effects model estimations.
Study 2 investigates the social and economic outcomes of broadcasters’ social and selling operations in a synchronous and interactive selling environment for e-commerce sellers and consumers. The sharp rise of live streaming selling has gained tremendous attention from both practitioners and researchers. Despite growing operations management (OM) involved in e-commerce live streaming (ELS), prior literature has largely neglected the social operations and selling operations of ELS broadcasters, which are an integral and important part of a company’s business operations and marketing strategy. To mitigate this gap, Study 2 examines the effects of broadcasters’ social operations and selling operations (i.e., informative and persuasive selling operations) on fan viewership and consumer purchase outcomes in ELS. Utilizing speech-to-text and text mining techniques, we empirically identify and measure broadcasters’ social and selling operations from corresponding ELS speech-to-text data. Using econometric model estimations with the instrumental variables identification approach, we quantify the relationship between ELS broadcasters’ social operations and fan viewership, that of broadcasters’ selling operations and consumer purchases, as well as the moderating effects of product types and fan viewership on purchase effects of selling operations.
Collectively, the empirical findings of the two studies offer novel contributions to the literature on live streaming and other relevant research fields. In addition, the two studies provide insightful managerial implications to the live streaming practitioners.