Live streaming e-commerce supply chain decisions considering dominant streamer under agency selling and reselling formats

Abstract

With the prevalence of live streaming e-commerce in the pandemic, brands and platforms cooperate with streamers to join this emerging e-commerce pattern. In the live streaming e-commerce supply chain composed of brand, third-party self-operated platform and streamers with different power, weak and dominant streamer, this paper investigates how the dominant streamer affects the supply chain decision-making under four scenarios composed of different selling formats and different power. Using a game-theoretic model, we find that the market demand can be enlarged by dominant streamer, and the dominant streamer tends to set lower price and lower marketing effort. Furthermore, the member who has the pricing power can obtain higher profit than the scenario in which they lose the power. And with the deeper of the degree of live streaming channel low price consensus among consumers, the streamers will invest more marketing effort as a compensation. Some managerial implications are showed in this paper.