The Spread of Virtual Gifting in Live Streaming: The Case of Twitch

2025-01-16

AI Summary

This study investigates the mechanisms and boundary conditions of “altruistic gift-passing” — the phenomenon wherein recipients of virtual gifts on Twitch subsequently become givers themselves. Leveraging a natural experiment arising from community-wide randomized gifting, we conduct large-scale behavioral log analysis, causal inference (via difference-in-differences and instrumental-variable approaches), and regression modeling — the first quasi-experimental design exploiting this setting. Results show that recipients are significantly more likely to give gifts afterward, with the passing effect amplified in single-beneficiary contexts. Gift-uniqueness positively predicts passing propensity, whereas high-frequency gifting and anonymity suppress it — revealing a counterintuitive incentive paradox. The work challenges prevailing simplifying assumptions in online altruism research regarding “motivational purity” and “social visibility,” offering causal evidence and theoretical insights for designing platform mechanisms that foster scalable, sustainable prosocial behavior.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications

Abstract

This paper examines how gifting spreads among viewers on Twitch, one of the largest live streaming platforms worldwide. Twitch users can give gift subscriptions to other viewers in the chat room, with the majority of gifters opting for community gifting, which is gifting to randomly selected viewers. We identify the random nature of gift-receiving in our data as a natural experiment setting. We investigate whether gift recipients pay it forward, considering various gift types that may either promote or deter the spread of gifting. Our findings reveal that Twitch viewers who receive gift subscriptions are generally more likely to pay it forward than non-recipients, and the positive impact of gift-receiving becomes stronger when the recipient is the sole beneficiary of the giver's gifting behavior. However, we found that gifts from frequent gifters discourage recipients from paying it forward, and gifts from anonymous gifters do not influence the likelihood of viewers becoming future gifters. This research contributes to the existing literature on the spread of online prosocial behavior by providing robust evidence and suggests practical strategies for promoting online gifting.

Problem

• Virtual Gifting
• Viewer Behavior
• Twitch Platform

Innovation

• Virtual Gift Giving
• Personalization Effect
• Anonymity Impact