演讲题目：Audience Size and Viewer Engagement in Live Streaming: Evidence from a Field Experiment

演讲嘉宾：Dai Yao，National University of Singapore Business School 

演讲时间：2018年9月21日（周五）上午10:30-11:30

演讲地点：群贤二（201）室

主持人：高月涛助理教授

文章摘要：

With major social media players embracing live streaming, understanding viewer engagement becomes vital as it determines revenues for a live stream. If gaining broadcaster attention motivates engagement, increasing audience size should decrease engagement because a larger audience lowers the likelihood of receiving a broadcaster’s attention. In contrast, a viewer’s social image related utility, which also motivates engagement, increases with audience size as recognition in front of a larger audience is more preferred. With these opposing views as background, we develop a rudimentary analytical model to relate audience size and viewer engagement and then scrutinize the analytical findings with a field experiment. We find an inverted U-shaped relationship between audience size and average payment/tip per viewer, which suggests the coexistence of attention seeking and social image related utilities for paid engagement behavior. In contrast, we find a U-shaped relationship between audience size and average chat per viewer; the initial negative effect is consistent with the lack of social image related utility in free engagement activities, while substitution between free and paid engagement activities seems to drive the subsequent positive effect. Finally, we find a positive spillover effect of viewer participation as a larger audience attracts more viewers to join in a session.

个人简介：

Dai Yao is an assistant professor of marketing at the National University of Singapore Business School. His research examines consumer and firm behaviors in various business contexts enabled by new technologies and new transactional relationships, such as social media and network-mediated environment, sharing economy, living streaming, mobile shopping, consumer financing, car rental and taxi ride, online labour markets, mobile games, crowdsourcing, among others, and has been published and accepted in Marketing Science and Management Science. He received his PhD in Management from INSEAD, MSc in Operations Management from Singapore Management University, and BEng in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University, and had extensive working experience prior to academia in high-tech research institutes and companies such as Microsoft Research Asia, Netease, Infosys, IDC, and Sohu.