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The first part of this dissertation focuses on livestream commerce. Livestream commerce has become an important sales channel with remarkable revenue potential and social implications, thanks to its ability to facilitate direct selling and enhance consumers’ perceived valuation of the product. However, practice has shown that livestream sales may also present unique challenges that can negatively affect brands' profits or farmers' welfare if not addressed properly.
When brands use this channel for sales promotion, they often need to negotiate sales prices and commission rates with key opinion leaders (KOLs) who promote products in livestream sales. KOLs typically promise low sales prices in their shows and are subject to reputation damage risks if their followers find cheaper prices of the same product elsewhere. Consequently, KOLs often bargain for deep discounts, which drive down negotiated prices and reduce brands' profit margins. We investigate how to mitigate KOLs' reputation damage concern and find that, when product availability in the livestream sale is low, offering a higher commission may be a more effective negotiation strategy than reducing price. We further show that the presence of consumer price search can either improve or undermine the profitability of a livestream sale, depending on the intensity of competition consumers face. Livestream sales are also advocated as a tool to improve smallholder farmers’ welfare by enabling direct sales to consumers and bypassing wholesale intermediaries. However, practice indicates that farmers often need to work with service intermediaries to facilitate such direct sales, which leaves them with little profit. Hence, it is unclear whether and under what circumstances livestream sales can benefit smallholder farmers. To investigate this, we compare rural livestreaming with contract farming, whereby farmers sell products to the market through a buying company that collects yield at a fixed wholesale price.
We show that, compared to contract farming, rural livestreaming can mitigate exploitation and improve farmers’ income for niche crops or crops with low planting costs. For crops with mass appeal or that are costly to plant, this sales method may worsen exploitation and hurt farmers’ income. Furthermore, rural livestreaming can be more effective in improving farmers’ income under yield uncertainty or if farmers’ power is enhanced, but may backfire in the presence of agricultural subsidies.
The second part of this dissertation investigates a retail innovation applied to food donation practices. Donating edible surplus food and making it available to food insecure communities is a preferred food recovery approach. An emerging type of donation outlet is pay-what-you-want food waste supermarkets where consumers can purchase edible salvaged food at a price that they are willing to pay as opposed to according to a posted price tag. In this paper, we analyze the impact of pay-what-you-want pricing for salvaged food on strategic consumer choices, and in turn, regular retailers’ replenishment and donation decisions. Accordingly, we evaluate how pricing scheme choices of donation outlet could influence food waste generation and food insecurity reduction.
Overall, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of accounting for the operational features of new technologies and retail innovations, stakeholder incentives, and product characteristics when leveraging emerging sales methods.