Promoting Sustainable Farmers’ E-Commerce Sales Participation in Tibet: A fsQCA Analysis of Behavioral Drivers

Rural e-commerce, as a new engine for rural development in the digital economy era, is highly expected to promote economic growth and sustainable development. Based on the reality of "high willingness but low action" in rural e-commerce sales participation in Tibet, this study integrates the intrinsic motivational drivers of behavior from the Theory of Planned Behavior with the external resource endowment constraints from the Factor Endowment Theory, constructing an analytical framework of "behavioral motivation-resource endowment" influencing factors. Utilizing survey data from the Livelihood Development in Tibetan Agricultural and Pastoral Areas (XLDR, 2023) and employing the fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) method, this study identifies the conditional configurations that influence the translation of rural e-commerce sales intentions into actual behaviors. The research findings indicate that a single condition does not constitute a necessary condition for the consistency between intentions and behaviors. In the sufficiency analysis of conditional configurations, three primary paths are identified, which can be further refined into two models: the "subjective norm-natural endowment dual-drive model" and the "capital endowment multi-drive model." This study overcomes the limitations of previous literature that only considered the impact of single variables, systematically proposes multiple causal paths of antecedent configurations for enhancing rural e-commerce sales participation, and thus provides new insights for improving rural e-commerce sales participation rates.