Self-broadcasting or cooperating with streamers? A perspective on live streaming sales of fresh products

Recently, live streaming sales have played an important role in promoting the fresh product industry. Producers (e.g., smallholders, cooperatives, family farms) can either directly build their own live rooms or use third-party streamers’ live rooms to sell fresh products, thereby forming two common live streaming sales modes. The former is called as self-broadcasting and the latter is called as streamer cooperation. Therefore, we build a theoretical model to investigate the performance of the two live streaming sales modes, and explore the monopolistic producer’s preference on them. We incorporate key characteristics of fresh products and live streaming into our model simultaneously, such as random output, endogenous decision of influence level and the resulting potential market size (i.e., fan base). Several extended cases are also considered to check the impact of other factors on the producer’s mode preference. The results show that when the probability of a good harvest is small (or large), the producer always prefers cooperating with a third-party streamer (or self-broadcasting). Conversely, when the probability of a good harvest is medium, the producer’s preference on the two live streaming sales modes depends on the magnitude of the relative efficiency of influence acquisition. We also find that the influence level in the streamer cooperation mode is not always higher than in the self-broadcasting mode, but the selling price is always higher. Additionally, the conclusions of several extended cases have confirmed the applicability of our main findings.