Big arena, small potatoes: A mixed-methods investigation of atmospheric cues in live-streaming e-commerce

Brands' self-built live streaming e-commerce has emerged as an embryonic and effective way of supporting customer purchase decisions. Moreover, the question of how small- and medium-sized enterprises can leverage IT-enabled factors to survive in the big arena has become a pressing concern. Extant research primarily focuses on broadcaster- and product-related factors by emphasizing psychological mechanisms and ignoring contextual factors from a holistic perspective. To address these research gaps, the complex interaction effects between IT-based atmospheric cues are explored in this paper using a mixed-methods approach. Drawing on affordance theory, we also integrate IT-based features with customer perceptions to further investigate the influencing mechanism of innovative decision-making contexts on customers' quick decisions.