Decision Delegation in Live Streaming Commerce: How Platform Complexity Increases the Value of Anchor Credibility

Abstract

The development of the digital economy has driven the continuous expansion of the live streaming e-commerce industry. The complexity of platform mechanisms has raised consumers' understanding costs, and coupled with the worsening information overload, consumer decision fatigue has become increasingly prominent. This even leads consumers to rely on anchors for purchase decisions, thus boosting the anchors' power and income, and such a situation has restricted the healthy development of the industry. Taking the consumer groups of live streaming e-commerce as the research object, this paper draws on authoritative industry reports and regulatory data, and adopts the methods of literature research and data analysis to define the core dimensions of anchor credibility, analyze the internal logical relationship between information overload and consumer decision fatigue, and explore the moderating mechanism of anchor credibility between the two. The results show that information overload significantly exacerbates consumer decision fatigue; improving anchors' professionalism and sincerity can effectively alleviate this problem, and strengthening platform supervision can positively enhance the moderating effect of anchor credibility. The research conclusions can provide practical references for the standardized development of the live streaming e-commerce industry, the construction of anchor credibility and the alleviation of consumer decision fatigue, as well as empirical evidence for relevant research fields.