Time: 10:00, 24 December 2025
Speaker: Jing Wu is a Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Business School, Associate Director of the Asian Institute of Supply Chains & Logistics, Director of the Internet Logistics Research Center, and Director of the MSc in Business Analytics Program. His research focuses on global supply chains, the intersection of operations and finance, innovation strategy, fintech, and business large models. He has published 20 papers in UTD journals including MS, MSOM, JAE, ISR, JIBS, and POMS, and serves as Associate Editor of MS, MSOM, and POMS. His academic insights have been widely reported by more than 400 global media outlets including Xinhua News Agency, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Forbes. He is the author of Global Supply Chain Supertrends and has been invited to give academic talks at institutions including the Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, Asian Development Bank, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and China Finance 40 Forum.
Abstract:
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.
