Consumer Trust Repair in Live Streaming Commerce

Consumer trust plays a fundamental role in facilitating transactions of live streaming commerce, yet the lack of mature norms makes consumer trust easily undermined. This raises the pertinent question of how consumer trust can be repaired after being damaged, which has been overlooked by the emerging literature on live streaming commerce. Drawing upon trust repair research, we theorize how broadcasters’ combination strategies of different levels of responsibility-taking contribute to trust repair by influencing consumer forgiveness, and we investigate the moderating role of consumers’ perceived parasocial interaction with broadcasters in such trust repair process. Through a scenario-based experiment, our results reveal that a high-level responsibility-taking strategy (i.e., a combination of acknowledging backward-looking responsibility and undertaking forward-looking responsibility) and a moderate-level responsibility-taking strategy (i.e., a combination of displacing backward-looking responsibility and undertaking forward-looking responsibility) are equally effective in repairing consumers' damaged trust in the broadcaster, whereas a low-level responsibility-taking strategy (i.e., a combination of displacing backward-looking responsibility and shirking forward-looking responsibility) cannot significantly repair consumers' trust. Furthermore, when consumers perceive higher parasocial interaction with broadcasters, broadcaster’s moderate and high levels of responsibility-taking strategies are more effective in repairing consumers’ damaged trust by facilitating forgiveness. This research contributes to the advancement of trust repair theory in live streaming commerce, and also provides practical insights for broadcasters to effectively resolve trust crises.