Research on Live-Streaming E-Commerce Regulatory Strategies Considering Dual Herd Mentality

The optimization of regulatory strategies for live-streaming e-commerce is essential for tackling misleading marketing behaviors (MMBs) and protecting stakeholders’ rights. This is fundamental to building a healthy and sustainable live-streaming e-commerce ecosystem. To address governance challenges and regulatory inefficiencies, this paper adopts a behavioral perspective and constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model involving platforms, live streamers, and consumers. It unveils the interactive mechanism between dual herd mentality and overconfidence in shaping regulatory strategy evolution, with numerical simulations validating the dynamic regulatory pathway. The findings indicate: (1) The severity of platform penalties is the linchpin of collaborative governance. Under low penalties, herd mentality may spur consumers to report live streamers who choose the MMB strategy, but the absence of deterrence traps the market in a “more reports, more MMBs” vicious circle. Moderate-to-high penalties align herd behavior with non-MMBs by live streamers, but risk unleashing irrational herd conduct among consumers. A dynamic matching mechanism that adapts penalty intensity to prevailing herd levels is therefore essential. Once a critical threshold is crossed, it enables synergistic benefits through joint supervision by consumers and platforms. (2) Overconfidence on the live streamer’s side magnifies the illusion of inflated returns. At low levels, the herd mentality from consumers can correct this psychological bias, but once overconfidence becomes pronounced, only large-scale supervising can outweigh the expected gains from MMBs. (3) These two behavioral traits jointly shape the equilibrium of the live-streaming e-commerce system and should therefore be treated as key considerations when designing dynamic regulatory strategies.