Beauty, Effort, and Earnings: Empirical Evidence from Livestreaming

31 Pages Posted: 23 Aug 2023

See all articles by Wensi Zhang

Wensi Zhang

University of Texas at Dallas - Naveen Jindal School of Management

Sha Yang

University of Southern California - Marshall School of Business

Yanhao 'Max' Wei

University of Southern California - Marshall School of Business

Date Written: August 22, 2023

Abstract

Beauty premium is a widely documented phenomenon where good-looking people enjoy benefits such as higher earnings. This paper contributes to the understanding of beauty premium by: (i) extending the analysis to the emerging industry of livestreaming, and (ii) emphasizing the role of effort (working hours). Effort plays a particularly important role in livestreaming because people can flexibly choose working hours. We use proprietary data of 500k livestreaming sessions from over 14k streamers from a large livestreaming platform. We estimate how a livestreamer's earnings relate to his or her: (i) effort, (ii) attractiveness (baseline beauty premium), and (iii) interaction between effort and attractiveness (effort-based beauty premium). To address the endogeneity of effort, we construct a novel instrument based on livestreamers' level-ups on the platform – people tend to exert more effort when they are close to level-up thresholds. We find that the effort-based premium dominates the baseline premium. In other words, the ratio of an attractive livestreamer's earnings to a peer's is near 1 when both exert very little effort. The ratio rises quickly as the effort level grows.

Keywords: Beauty premium, earnings, effort, effort-based beauty premium, livestreaming

Suggested Citation

Zhang, Wensi and Yang, Sha and Wei, Yanhao, Beauty, Effort, and Earnings: Empirical Evidence from Livestreaming (August 22, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4548834 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4548834

Wensi Zhang (Contact Author)

University of Texas at Dallas - Naveen Jindal School of Management ( email )

P.O. Box 830688
Richardson, TX 75083-0688
United States

Sha Yang

University of Southern California - Marshall School of Business ( email )

701 Exposition Blvd
Los Angeles, CA California 90089
United States

Yanhao Wei

University of Southern California - Marshall School of Business ( email )

701 Exposition Blvd
Los Angeles, CA California 90089
United States

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