Modelling the Impacts of Social Value on Platform Identity: The Mediating-Moderating Research Design in Live-Streaming Context

In the era of digitalization and epidemic, more people deeply rely on digital tools. Digital tools can be used to complete transactions for food delivery, daily necessities and car booking. Live broadcasting is one of the representative products in the digital era. Users’ perceived social value and its impacts are important to the society and operators of platform. Fewer studies, however, have verified the relationships among social value, platform dependence, and platform identity. Accordingly, the research purpose of this paper is to analyze users' digital inertia, social values, and the relationships among their dependence and their identity on livestreaming platforms. Data was collected by questionnaire survey and 372 valid samples were received. Findings show that in the relationships between live streaming platforms and users, positive relationships among variables were met; the social value perceived by the users could affect platform identity through platform dependence; and users' perceived digital inertia significantly could moderate the relationship between social value and platform dependence. It is suggested that operators should strengthen users' perception of social value when designing live broadcast activities.