Does depletion trigger buy? Testing a moderated moderated-mediation and conditional model in the context of live streaming commerce

In recent years, live streaming commerce has shown a spurt of development and become a new economic development windfall. However, research on live streaming is limited, and most studies lack a delineation of the specific content of live streaming and an examination of the internal states of consumers. Considering the intra-individual differences of consumers, this paper proposed moderated moderated-mediation model that includes an ego depletion state as the first moderator and Impulse Buying Tendency (IBT) as the second moderator of the relationship between hedonic value and purchase intention via attitude. The findings tested by a field experiment with the dual-task paradigm, suggest that high hedonic live streaming drives a more positive attitude and a stronger purchase intention. Moreover, when consumers are in a state of ego depletion, this drive is more pronounced and consumers with high IBT enhance the influence of ego depletion. Based on these results, theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.