Purchasing social attention by tipping: Materialism predicts online tipping in live‐streaming platform through self‐enhancement motive

Abstract Online tipping, or virtual gift‐giving, on live‐streaming platforms is an increasingly common consumer behavior in cyberspace. Perplexingly, when live‐stream viewership itself is free, viewers voluntarily spend money to buy virtual gifts and send them to their preferred streamers. The present study aimed to examine the motivational mechanism underlying these voluntary tipping behaviors from the perspectives of materialism and self‐enhancement. By a representative online survey ( N = 1224), we found that participants' materialist beliefs were positively associated with both the likelihood and the amount of online tipping, and the self‐enhancement motive could significantly mediate this association; furthermore, streamer endorsement could moderate the link between the self‐enhancement motive and tipping amount. These findings suggest that materialist beliefs and downstream self‐related motivations are among the main driving forces for online tipping. The present results extended previous research on materialism by testing its effects in a newly emerging online consumer behavior and providing direct evidence for the moderation role of the “symbolic‐ness” of materialist behaviors. Practical implications for live‐streaming platforms, educators and policymakers, such as introducing tipping amount caps, were also discussed.