EXPRESS: Toward Intelligent Virtual Streamers: Leveraging Responsiveness and Response Naturalness in E-commerce Livestreaming

Despite the increasing deployment of virtual streamers in e-commerce livestreaming, their effectiveness remains inconsistent. We explore this issue through the lens of intelligent interactivity, focusing on how and why the interaction effect between responsiveness and response naturalness shapes downstream outcomes in virtual livestreaming. We further test whether the presence of a livestream assistant moderates the effect of responsiveness under low response naturalness. One recall study and five experiments show that virtual streamers’ high responsiveness results in a higher likelihood of purchase intention and livestreaming continuance when response naturalness is high but nonexistent when naturalness is low. This joint effect can be explained by dual social influence processes: mental imagery quality and consumer-virtual streamer identification. Furthermore, the effect of responsiveness on both purchase intention and livestreaming continuance via mental imagery quality is only evident when a human livestream assistant is present in the low-naturalness context. Our findings contribute to the emerging field of virtual livestreaming and digital humans’ interactivity design. We also provide practical insights to e-commerce marketers and virtual streamer developers on how to optimize virtual livestreaming effectiveness.