Battle of Streamers: Impacts of the Top Streamer on Live Streaming Platforms

Live streaming commerce (LSC) has garnered remarkable success worldwide, drawing increasing interest from academics and practitioners alike. This paper contributes to the “substitution or spillovers” debate by investigating how competitor entry impacts other streamers’ performance across different stages of viewer purchasing journey. Our econometric models show that the dominance of the two competing effects (spillover vs. substitution) hinges on the viewers’ stage in the customer journey (browsing vs. purchasing). On the one hand, the return of the top streamer elevated the overall viewing traffic for competing streamers, indicating a spillover effect at the browsing stage. On the other hand, the same event resulted in lower sales amounts for others, demonstrating a substitution effect at the purchasing stage. Our results offer actionable insights for LSC platform managers to strategically allocate resources in managing streamers.