Driving Live Streaming Commitment with Goal Incentives Based on Viewer Reciprocity: A Quasi-Natural Experiment: Completed Research Paper

Driving streaming commitment from individual streamers is critical to the sustainable growth of live streaming platforms, and platform operators tend to apply incentives to motivate streamers for such voluntary content contributions. However, most monetary incentives have an unintended impact on reducing the intrinsic motivation of streamers, resulting in fewer efforts and less commitment to streaming productions. This study explores the effect of a novel goal incentive design based on viewer reciprocal support. Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment, we estimate the causal impact of the incentive scheme using the combination of a coarsened exact matching (CEM) approach with the difference-in-differences (DID) model. Our results confirm that the goal incentive based on viewer reciprocal support could positively drive streamers’ efforts in live streaming. This paper contributes to the literature on driving user generated content in emerging digital platforms and offers important implications for streaming platform operators.