The Impact of Scarcity Cues on Consumer Behavior and Decision-Making in Live Broadcast Sales

As the e-commerce sector develops quickly, clients' decision-making has been greatly affected by live-streaming sales. While paying attention to the live-streaming promotion scene, this research digs whether scarcity cues can activate clients' loss aversion emotions to improve purchase transformation rates, reduce decision-making cycles, and decrease abandonment rates. Adopting a controlled experimental design, the research makes the experiment on Douyin and other platforms: the implantation of experimental group with scarcity cues such as "Only 5 pieces left of the product" is made, while regular good data is only offered by the control group. While keeping the same host and speech modes, both groups control variables by alternating live-streaming in two daily time slots. The platform's backend offers live-streaming data, and the quantification of loss aversion scores is made by pop-up questionnaires. The key indexes for information processing encompass purchase transformation rate, average decision-making time, payment abandonment rate, and loss aversion score. The results show that the purchase conversion rate of the experimental group (28.01%) is significantly higher than that of the control group (21.03%) (t = 21.36, p < 0.001), the average decision-making time (9.32 minutes) is shorter than that of the control group (13.64 minutes) (t = -24.18, p < 0.001), the payment abandonment rate (15.89%) is lower than that of the control group (23.05%) (t = -12.75, p < 0.001), and the loss aversion score (3.61 points) is higher than that of the control group (2.47 points) (t = 25.89, p < 0.001), verifying the two hypotheses: "Scarcity cues activate loss aversion and enhance conversion" (H1) and "Compression of dual constraints shortens decision-making cycle" (H2). This study fills the literature gap of scarcity cues in live-streaming scenarios and provides a reference for optimizing marketing strategies in e-commerce. However, it does not distinguish the types of scarcity cues, and the sample focuses on a single platform. With future studies, the research can be expanded to various platforms and across cultures.