Live streaming commerce is a novel form of an e-commerce platform, which works by establishing a temporary virtual community shared by streamers and customers in real time. With the popularity of live streaming shopping, many e-retailers adopted this new platform to promote their products in an effort to boost their sales volume. On the basis of signalling theory and social exchange theory (SET), this study proposes a research model to examine the informational signals and customer-streamer exchanges that two parties shared using live streaming platform. An online survey with 735 samples was collected through a professional online survey service platform (i.e., Wenjuanxing) to measure our model. Our results indicate that both service-centred signal (interaction quality) and product-centred signal (streamer credibility) have significant positive influences on customer evaluation of information quality. The results also denote that the received information quality acts as a significant predictor of customer engagement and buying tendency. Moreover, the results confirm the mediation role of customer engagement in predicting impulsive buying tendency, and the moderation effects of guanxi orientation on customer engagement and impulsive buying tendency. By synthesizing the preceding findings, theoretical and practical implications are discussed in the context of live streaming commerce.

Research efforts to explain the buyer-seller transaction have evolved from economic utilitarian approaches to ones incorporating social and psychological approaches. Earlier research, for example, relied on transaction cost analysis to help and explain the firm’s engagement in business relationships with a focus on minimizing the direct and opportunity costs of exchange (Lambe, Wittmann, & Speckman, 2001; Rindfleisch & Heide, 1997). Transaction cost analysis, however, is limited in explaining many relationship-based exchanges, of longer terms in particular, that have become more recent business goals and strategies across industries. Such limitations motivated researchers to adopt social and psychological perspectives that could enrich explanations of the exchange relationship. Social exchange theory (hereafter, SET) is one such approach that has resulted in widespread applications in more recent marketing research (Lambe et al., 2001). In addition to economic outcomes of an exchange, SET allows marketers to model non-economic, social and psychological outcomes in understanding and predicting whether the exchange relationship will continue or not.

  The purpose of this study is to examine the determinants of union commitment and union participation intention based on the social exchange perspective and apply implications to union setting to improve union management. The results are as follows：First