Recently, the paper titled “Happiness Begets Money: Emotion and Engagement in Live Streaming” with Dr. Xingyu Chen (Associate Professor in the Department of Marketing in the College of Management at Shenzhen University) as the corresponding author was officially accepted by Journal of Marketing Research (SSCI, latest impact factor 4.626), one of UTD24 top journals. This paper was co-authored with Dr. Yan Lin (Assistant Professor in the Shenzhen Audencia Business School at Shenzhen University) and Dr. Dai Yao (Assistant Professor of Marketing in the NUS Business School at National University of Singapore).

    Live streaming offers an unprecedented opportunity for content creators (broadcasters) to deliver their content to consumers (viewers) in real time. In a live stream, viewers may send virtual gifts (tips) to the broadcaster and engage free of charge with likes and chats. These activities reflect viewers’ underlying emotion and are likely to be affected by the broadcaster’s emotion. This paper examines the role of emotion in interactive and dynamic business settings such as live streaming. To account for the possibility that broadcaster emotion, viewer emotion, and viewer activities influence each other, we estimate a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model on data at the minute level from 1,450 live streams. The results suggest that a happier broadcaster makes the audience happier and begets intensified viewer activities, in particular tips. In addition, broadcasters reciprocate viewer engagement with more smiles. Further analyses suggest that these effects are pronounced only after a live stream has been active for a while and they manifest only in streams by broadcasters who had more experience, received more tips, or were more popular in past live streams. These results help platforms and broadcasters optimize marketing interventions such as broadcaster emotion enhancement in live streaming and quantify the financial returns.

    Journal of Marketing Research, as one of the American Marketing Association journals published by SAGE, is included in the UTD list of 24 journals (UTD24) and the FT list of 50 journals (FT50). The UTD24 journals, compiled by the University of Texas at Dallas, are the top journals used to provide the top 100 business school rankings since 1990 based on the total contributions of faculty. The FT50 journals, selected by the world's leading global business publication Financial Times, are the most prestigious academic journals used for ranking global business schools. This paper is Dr. Xingyu Chen’s second UTD24 and third FT50 paper. Her first UTD24 paper as the corresponding author was accepted by Marketing Science (SSCI, latest impact factor 3.019) in 2020, and her first FT50 paper as the first author was published in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (SSCI, latest impact factor 7.959) in 2019. Meanwhile, this paper is also the third UTD24 paper published by the faculty of College of Management at Shenzhen University. The first UTD24 paper with Dr. Yinghui Zhou as the first author was accepted in Journal of Marketing Research (SSCI, latest impact factor 4.626) in 2020.