Breaking the Homogenization Deadlock: A Hybrid SEM–ANN Approach to Modeling Impulsive Buying in Live Streaming E-Commerce

In a highly homogeneous market environment, consumers’ cognitive inertia towards standardized products continues to strengthen, and traditional functional attributes significantly weaken the driving force of impulse buying. This study is based on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM). It constructs a dual-path theoretical framework of “cognitive inertia cue arousal”, aiming to reveal a new triggering mechanism for impulse buying behavior (IBB) in homogeneous competition. This study proposes a hybrid structural equation model (SEM) and artificial neural network (ANN) approach to evaluate the driving factors behind consumers’ maintenance of IBB in the context of homogeneous competition. Specifically, the first stage involves identifying key variables that significantly affect IBB using SEM. The second stage consists of predicting the accuracy of the outcome variables and ranking their importance using an ANN. This study confirms two pathways: product cognitive inertia (customized information and promotional discounts) and peripheral cue arousal (anchor novelty display strategy and observation learning). Research has found that observational learning has a positive impact on perceived attention. Interestingly, perceived attention does not have a significant mediating effect between promotional discounts and IBB. This discovery provides a theoretical basis and practical paradigm for cracking the involution competition.