Emotional Variability and Consumer Engagement: The Case of a Large Live Streaming Platform
(A2023-114415)

AUTHORS

Chongyan Sun, Chinese University of Hong Kong; Francisco Orlando Cisternas Vera, Chinese University of Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

The live streaming industry has witnessed a rapid growth in recent years, especially during the pandemic. Like other tech companies, a live streaming platform has to carefully manage the consumer engagement to boost its capital market performance. One of the key drivers of the consumer engagement is their emotion. Extending the established theory that higher consumer emotional valence enhances engagement, we hypothesize that higher consumer emotional variability also promotes consumer engagement. We test it by collecting live streaming sessions of top streamers from a large live streaming platform in China. We split each session into ten-second intervals and generate comment volume and comment emotional scores for each interval, from which bivariate time series are constructed. We estimate a SVAR-GARCH-in-mean model separately for all streamers and find positive and significant effects of emotional variability on engagement for most sessions. Managerial implications are discussed.