  A common belief about the growing medium of livestreaming is that its value
lies in its "live" component. We examine this belief by comparing how the price
elasticity of demand for live events varies before, on the day of, and after
livestream. We do this using unique and rich data from a large livestreaming
platform that allows consumers to purchase the recorded version of livestream
after the stream is over. A challenge in our context is that there exist
high-dimensional confounders whose relationships with treatment policy (i.e.,
price) and outcome of interest (i.e., demand) are complex and only partially
known. We address this challenge via the use of a generalized Orthogonal Random
Forest framework for heterogeneous treatment effect estimation. We find
significant temporal dynamics in the price elasticity of demand over the entire
event life-cycle. Specifically, demand becomes less price sensitive over time
to the livestreaming day, turning to inelastic on that day. Over the
post-livestream period, the demand for the recorded version is still sensitive
to price, but much less than in the pre-livestream period. We further show that
this temporal variation in price elasticity is driven by the quality
uncertainty inherent in such events and the opportunity of real-time
interaction with content creators during the livestream.
