2820 
3212Live streaming is a new type of the Internet economy, which has become a significant driving force for China’s economic development. As an emerging economic form with extensive commercial and social ramifications, live streaming fosters virtual digital product consumption through interactions between streamers and audiences. However, existing research predominantly hinges on subjective data, with scant focus on the social incentives of audiences’ tipping behavior. Therefore, this paper aims to delve into the social motivation implicated in live streaming tipping, in order to help government departments guide the healthy development of digital economy such as live streaming.
By collecting the live streaming data from Douyu platform, this paper finds that the stronger the commodified intimacy between streamers and audiences, the higher the live streaming income will be. Furthermore, it introduces threshold regression to identify the two types of audience interaction: competitive tipping and following tipping. In competitive tipping, it is found that top audiences’ tipping suppresses the participation of non-top audiences and inhibits the growth of streamer income. In contrast, following tipping encourages non-top audiences to pay and promotes the growth of streamer income. Moreover, the disclosure of personal information by streamers can help to increase income in competitive tipping; while in following tipping, the opposite is true.
The marginal contributions of this paper are that: First, from the sociological perspective, it creatively reveals the commodified intimacy between streamers and audiences, and suggests that the motivation of audiences to tip streamers lies in social incentives. Second, it identifies the competitive tipping and following tipping in live streaming communities, analyzes the social motivation of audience behavior, and reveals the theoretical logic of hierarchical differentiation in live streaming communities. Third, it explores the diverse impacts of personal information disclosure by streamers on their streaming income under different audience community structures. In summary, this paper confirms that social motivation is the underlying motivation of live streaming tipping, theoretically explaining the operational mechanism of live streaming communities.
