关键词: 直播电商供应链, 带货努力, 流量补贴, 委托代理

Abstract: Live streaming commerce has become an emerging channel in the supply chain to boost product sales, clear inventory, and enhance brand value. However, as live streaming commerce is a relatively new business mode, several critical issues arise for its healthy development. These issues include the streamer's efforts in promoting products (such as comprehensive product descriptions, professional recommendations, and positive attitudes), the contractual relationships among streamers, brand suppliers, and platforms, as well as the fair distribution of revenues. Therefore, this paper focuses on the live streaming commerce supply chain, which consists of brand suppliers, live streaming platforms, and streamers. Based on the principal-agent theory and considering the information asymmetry, this study constructs incentive contract models under two scenarios: one where the platform does not have a contractual relationship with the streamer and only the brand supplier provides incentives, and the other where the streamer has a contract with the live streaming platform, with the brand supplier offering commissions incentives and the platform providing traffic incentives to the streamer. The research aims to explore the optimal revenue distribution and incentive contracts within the live streaming commerce supply chain under these two scenarios, analyze the effect of platform traffic subsidies as incentives, and examine how decision variables change with the streamer's influence. The study provides insights and references for the healthy development of the live streaming commerce supply chain. The main conclusions of this study are as follows.
(1)Revenue sharing ratios among live streaming platforms, brand suppliers, and streamers: when the platform does not have a contract with the streamer, the optimal revenue-sharing ratio for the platform will be only related to the product category (i.e., related to the price and cost of a certain type of product) and fixed, which aligns with the real-world situation of live streaming commerce. In a contractual model, when the streamer's influence exceeds a certain threshold, the revenue-sharing ratios for both the streamer and the brand supplier will increase, while the platform's share will decrease.
(2)Traffic subsidy incentives from live streaming platforms to streamers: the traffic subsidy provided by the platform increases with the streamer's influence, meaning that the more influential a streamer is, the more traffic subsidy it receives. In particular, providing traffic subsidies to highly risk-averse streamers can have a greater incentive effect.
(3)Profits of various members in the live streaming commerce supply chain: there exists a signing threshold where it is unfavorable for the platform to sign a contract with the streamer if the streamer's influence is below this threshold. Only when the streamer's influence exceeds this threshold does it become beneficial for the platform to enter into a contract. Therefore, in practice, live streaming platforms could prioritize inviting streamers within the signing threshold and offer attractive traffic subsidy incentives to optimize the expected profits of all members in the supply chain and achieve a win-win situation.
The limitations of this study lie in its focus on the incentive issues when the streamer's promotional efforts are unobservable. Future research could also consider the moral hazard when brand suppliers provide counterfeit or inferior products. Additionally, this study only considers the streamer's influence, and future research could incorporate the streamer's bargaining power when negotiating with suppliers for more price discounts, to explore pricing issues in live streaming e-commerce.

Key words: live streaming commerce supply chain, streamer's selling effort, traffic subsidy, principal-agent