Everyone Can Be a Star in the Digital Economy: Quantifying the Business Value of Live Streaming Technology in Online Retail

With the rise of live streaming technologies in popular culture and the digital economy, live streaming has begun to attract interest from the research community as well as from practitioners. Despite recent research focusing on understanding the behaviors and motivations of individuals engaging in live streaming, the business value of live streaming in the digital economy is rarely studied. In this paper, we establish a relationship between the adoption of live streaming by online retailers and online product sales. Based on the difference-in-differences model of the look-ahead propensity score matched sample in a quasi-experimental setting, our results indicate that adopting live streaming significantly boosts online product sales. Furthermore, we find that the adoption of live streaming significantly moderates seller’s uncertainty in the e-commerce context. The results are consistent across different types of uncertainty, including the uncertainty generated by seller ratings, product informativeness, and textual feedback comments. Further, our estimation results are robust to various falsification tests. This work represents a pioneering effort in quantifying the business value of adopting live streaming in an online retail context. And the findings from this work offer various implications for academic research and practice, as live streaming becomes ubiquitous.