Organizational Structure and Platform Incentives in Group Live Streaming: A Theoretical Analysis from the Perspective of Two-Sided Markets

Abstract

With the development of digital platforms, both the content production and the creation of the creator economy have been greatly transformed. Among other production modes, group live streaming has become increasingly significant as more and more creators work collaboratively in terms of sharing resources, audiences, and responsibility in production. In this paper, group live streaming will be analyzed through the lenses of organizational economics and platform governance. By integrating the concepts of two-sided market, team production and creator economy into one theoretical framework, the author explores the mechanism of organizational choices determined by the factors of creator heterogeneity, collaborative benefit, organizational cost and platform incentive. The current paper claims that group live streaming emerges due to heterogeneity among creators and develops because of the incentives of the platforms like traffic allocation and recommendation systems. It is shown that the hypotheses need to be tested empirically.