【学术讲座】直播销售中说服性话语对销量的影响

Decoding the Sales Impact of Persuasive Strategies in Livestream Selling

直播销售中说服性话语对销量的影响

Guest Speaker: Prof. Wu, Jing (吴靖)

Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) 

Time/Date: 10 am, November 7th, 2025

Classroom:    Room510, Tongji Building A

ABSTRACT | 讲座摘要

Livestreaming e-commerce is transforming digital retail by enabling rapid, real-time purchase decisions driven by streamers’ sales pitches. Yet the persuasive role of language in this high-stakes, competitive setting remains underexplored. We develop a theory-driven framework of seven persuasive strategies and introduce an iterative prompt engineering procedure to identify these strategies from streamers' presentations using Large Language Models (LLMs). We apply our framework to a large dataset of TikTok's top accounts, which aired 1,683 livestream events during our two-week study period, generating over 2.6 million sentences (130 million tokens) in sales pitches. Exploiting within-livestream-streamer-product variation and an instrumental variable approach, we identify the effects of persuasive strategies on instant sales. Our findings indicate that even modest increases in persuasive content during livestreams raise sales, with experience-based appeals, trust building, and audience targeting proving most effective, particularly for popular products in competitive markets. Persuasion works best when delivered with concrete, credible language rather than overly emotional or positive appeals, highlighting the value of clarity over sentiment. This study also demonstrates a scalable LLM-based method for extracting persuasive strategies from massive, multimodal datasets, offering new tools for both researchers and practitioners.

GUEST BIO | 讲者介绍

Jing Wu is a Professor in the Department of Decisions, Operations, and Technology at CUHK Business School, holding leadership roles including Director of the MSc in Business Analytics, Director of the Centre of Cyber Logistics, and Associate Director of the Asian Institute of Supply Chains & Logistics. He earned a PhD in operations management (minor in economics/finance) and MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, plus a bachelor’s in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University.

His research focuses on global supply chain management, operations-finance interface, sustainable operations, and business intelligence, using empirical methods like applied econometrics and machine learning. He has published in top journals (e.g., Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management) and authored influential monographs (e.g., Global Trends in Manufacturing Supply Chains). His insights feature in MIT Sloan Management Review and Forbes, with coverage across 20+ countries.

Academically, he serves as Associate Editor for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and Senior Editor for Production and Operations Management, and founded the Workshop on Empirical Operations Management (WEOM). He also has industry experience at Deutsche Bank (New York) and McKinsey (Shanghai).