Research from Associate Professor Xin Liu examines how online platforms can use live streaming to strengthen their store brands and compete with established national brands.
A new study co-authored by Xin Liu, associate professor of supply chain management in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, examines how live streaming can help online platforms compete when shoppers perceive their store-brand products as lower quality than national brands.
The research, titled “Leveraging live streaming for effective platform encroachment: Overcoming product quality disadvantages,” was published in the Journal of Industrial and Management Optimization and co-authored by Xiaoya Han and Mengdie Li, both of the Business School at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology.
Online platforms increasingly offer their own private-label products alongside established brands. Through live product demonstrations and engagement with shoppers, platforms can improve consumers’ perceptions of those products and strengthen their competitive position.
Liu and her co-authors used a game-theoretic model to examine how investments in live streaming influence a platform’s decision to introduce its own brand. They also explored how national-brand manufacturers respond through wholesale pricing.
Key findings:
- Greater investment in live streaming does not always lead manufacturers to raise or lower wholesale prices. Their response depends on the balance between expanding the market and increasing competition from the platform’s own products.
- Under agency selling arrangements, in which platforms collect commissions on manufacturers’ sales, higher commission rates can encourage platforms to introduce their own brands.
- When platforms and manufacturers make pricing decisions at the same time, more direct competition between their products can become more likely.
The findings offer guidance for platforms weighing investments in live streaming, the development of their own brands and relationships with national-brand manufacturers. They also help manufacturers understand how digital marketing tools may reshape competition within online marketplaces.
Liu joined Elon in 2017 after earning her doctorate in management science and engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China. Her research examines operations management, supply chain management and their connections to marketing.
She teaches courses in management information systems, operations and supply chain management, logistics and distribution, and supply chain performance.