Consumer engagement in live streaming commerce: Value co-creation and incentive mechanisms

Interaction is at the core of value co-creation. Consumer engagement in live streaming interactions not only results in obtaining additional product information but also gains interactive value. From the perspective of value co-creation, this paper studies the optimal sales strategy selection for brands in three sales modes: traditional ecommerce, brand live streaming and influencer live streaming. Further, this paper designs an incentive mechanism to attract consumers to participate in value co-creation under two live streaming sales modes and explores the impact of the incentive mechanism on live streaming sales mode selection. The results show that the brand chooses the traditional e-commerce mode when the total market size exceeds a certain threshold; otherwise, the brand can select the live streaming mode to create more value. Under the brand live streaming mode, providing incentive mechanisms to encourage consumer engagement in live streaming is beneficial for achieving value cocreation when the incentive level is below a certain threshold. Under the influencer live streaming mode, the brand shares incentive costs with the influencer instead of being conducive to value addition, i.e., the incentive cost should be borne by the influencer rather than the brand.