Product or Cultural Knowledge: Where Should More Attention Be Directed? Analyzing the Heterogeneous Effects of Streamers’ Knowledge-Sharing on Consumer Purchases in Live Streaming

This study investigates how product and cultural knowledge shared by streamers in live streaming e-commerce affect consumers’ purchase behavior, and examines the heterogeneity of these effects across different live streaming times. Drawing on dual-processing theory and attention theory, we develop a comprehensive empirical model with an unsupervised machine learning approach applied to 198,648 min of live streaming data from Douyin, a leading Chinese e-commerce platform. Our findings show that different dimensions of streamers’ knowledge-sharing have distinct impacts on consumer purchase behavior, with cultural knowledge demonstrating a significantly stronger effect than product knowledge. Furthermore, we find that live streaming time moderates the relationship between streamers’ knowledge-sharing and consumers’ purchase behavior. This study provides empirical insights for streamers, enterprises, and live-streaming platforms to develop differentiated marketing strategies and customize live streaming content to optimize conversion rates and marketing effectiveness.