Abstract
Live streaming e-commerce is becoming prevalent and its new business model attracts much attention from the marketing and information systems fields. In this paper, we examine the relationships between influencers and the role of mega-influencers on the live streaming e-commerce platform. Based on a large-scale dataset and a natural experiment, we explore how influencers’ performance is affected and how the audiences’ visits and purchases change for other influencers when mega influencers leave the platform. We find that there exist two significant effects from mega influencers, including a signaling effect and a drainage effect. When mega influencers left the live streaming platform, the audiences’ visits for other influencers significantly decrease, suggesting that there exists a significant drainage effect on audiences’ visits from mega influencers. There is a significant number of audiences’ visits coming from mega influencers to other influencers. When mega influencers leave from the platform, the sales for other influencers also significantly decrease with the controlled audiences’ visits, showing a significant signaling effect from mega influencers. Our paper illustrates that the treatment effects of mega influencers continuously affected other influencers. Based on a causal forest approach, we show that there exist heterogeneously treatment effects across influencers. The influencers with a large number of followers are affected more than the influencers with a small number of followers.
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The research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant [number 71831005 & 71771063].
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Wang, H., Li, G., Wu, S. (2022). What’s the Role of Mega-influencers in Live Streaming E-commerce—A Natural Experiment. In: Salvendy, G., Wei, J. (eds) Design, Operation and Evaluation of Mobile Communications. HCII 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13337. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05014-5_23
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