Research on the Game Equilibrium and Strategy Selection Among Participants in the Live Streaming Ecosystem

Abstract

Live streaming commerce has become a core driver of digital retail growth, and traffic resources are increasingly central to shaping interactions between platforms and manufacturers. Focusing on public traffic pricing, this study examines the strategic behavior and equilibrium outcomes of platforms and manufacturers in the live streaming ecosystem, comparing decisions under uniform pricing strategy and differential pricing strategy. We develop a Stackelberg game model consisting of one platform and two manufacturers with heterogeneous traffic conversion capabilities, where the platform acts as the leader and determines the public traffic price, while the manufacturers respond as followers by choosing their retail prices. Through theoretical derivation and numerical simulation, we compare price and profit outcomes across the two strategies. The results show that the platforms optimal public traffic pricing strategy is significantly shaped by the small manufacturers conversion efficiency. When this efficiency is low, the differential pricing strategy allows the platform to obtain higher returns, whereas the uniform pricing strategy becomes more suitable once the small manufacturers conversion efficiency reaches a sufficiently high level. The two strategies also lead to distinct pricing behaviors for manufacturers. Under the uniform pricing strategy, product pricing is largely governed by the difference in traffic con- version efficiency between manufacturers. In contrast, under the differential pricing strategy, the public traffic price gap set by the platform becomes the dominant factor influencing their pricing decisions. we also find the differential pricing strategy can narrow the profit gap between manufacturers. Our research presents some guidelines for platforms to design traffic pricing strategies and manufacturers to make pricing decisions in live streaming supply chain.