Entrepreneurship has been hailed as a potential solution for poverty alleviation, with digital entrepreneurship on the rise. However, how impoverished digital entrepreneurs leverage the increasingly ubiquitous live-streaming platforms to overcome poverty remains unexplored. Drawing on social comparison theory, we propose that the poverty of impoverished digital entrepreneurs which become visible via visual poverty cues, evoke netizens‘s multi-dimensional empathy and happy-for-ness, stimulating their purchase intention. Our experiment (n=115) revealed that higher netizen’s perception of poverty toward impoverished digital entrepreneurs, greater purchase intention and our online survey (n=473) confirmed the mediating role of associative empathy and happy-for-ness. This research contributes to entrepreneurship for poverty alleviation by demonstrating how impoverished digital entrepreneurs can leverage their own agency through strategically utilize visual cues to gain netizens’ support thus reducing poverty, complementing the view that poverty reduction relies primarily on external financial support.
