From stress to impulse buying: the perspective of informational conformity and competitive arousal in livestreaming e-commerce

Impulsive buying has become increasingly prevalent in livestreaming e-commerce. While existing research predominantly explains this phenomenon considering consumers’ positive responses to livestreaming, stress response mechanisms remain underexplored. To address this issue, this study adopts a context-attitude-behavior framework to investigate how five contextual stimuli (time pressure, perceived product scarcity, perceived product popularity, vicarious experience, and livestream audience involvement) affect impulsive buying through two distinct coping strategies under situational stress stimuli (informational conformity and competitive arousal). The proposed relationships were validated using 783 survey responses and a structural equation modeling-artificial neural network hybrid approach. It is found that impulse buying can be affected by competitive arousal and informational conformity, with the former being influenced by the five contextual stimuli and moderated by informational influence susceptibility and the latter being affected by time pressure and perceived product scarcity. These findings offer certain insights into impulsive buying from a stress response perspective and provide some actionable guidance for practice.