Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments February 20, 2023 erstellt
Beschreibung:
Livestream technology is increasingly transforming consumers’ online shopping experience, as it enables streamers to perform real-time product presentation while interacting with a large number of consumers to sell those products. In this research, we address how livestream selling platforms can potentially mitigate the tension between streamers’ constrained service capacity and individual service demands with algorithm-based assistants (termed “AI assistants”). In partnership with the world’s largest online shopping platform, we report a large-scale field experiment wherein the consumers in the treatment group have access to an AI assistant that predicts consumers’ potential needs and provides individualized services, while the consumers in the control group do not have access to such an AI assistant. By analyzing data from 132,199 consumers, we find that the introduction of the AI assistant increases sales by 2.61% and reduces product returns by 62.86%. More interestingly, with granular clickstream data, our models on multiple-stage purchase decision-making reveal that an AI assistant increases the duration of the awareness and consideration stages, improves the probability of placing an order in the evaluation stage and, more importantly, reduces the likelihood of product returns (given that the order is placed) at the post-purchase stage. Further, our analyses of consumer comments reveal that interacting with the AI assistant also reduces consumers’ expressions of affection and positive emotions. We further indicate that interaction with an AI assistant triggers consumers to make fewer emotion-driven decisions, which likely leads to high-quality purchase decisions. Moreover, our heterogeneous treatment effects analyses reveal that an AI assistant only exhibits significant effects in selling products that have a higher level of product uncertainty. Overall, our findings provide actionable implications for online shopping platforms in designing and implementing AI artifacts