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This study examines a double-edged sword effect that may affect consumer response when organizations announce their adoption of generative AI. This effect was found to be mediated by a decrease in consumers’ perceived humaneness toward the firm and an increase in their perceived innovativeness toward the firm in response to announcements of firm-generative AI collaboration. Using a 2 (collaboration type: human-generative AI vs. human-human) × 2 (collaboration dependence: low vs. high) between-participants design, 183 students completed an online survey using news article stimuli. Perceived humaneness decreased and perceived innovativeness increased after the announcement of a company’s use of generative AI, compared to the control condition in which the announcement was made about the company’s human-to-human collaboration. Furthermore, the more a company relied on generative AI, the more perceived humaneness decreased, while perceived innovativeness did not change significantly. We found that a decrease in perceived humaneness has a negative impact on consumers’ perceptions of service efforts, brand attitudes, and purchase intentions, while an increase in perceived innovativeness can have a positive impact. Furthermore, when service failures occurred after a company announced the introduction of generative AI, increases in humaneness and innovativeness were associated with greater decreases in brand attitudes and purchase intentions, and increased negative word-of-mouth intentions. Given that AI will be increasingly utilized as AI technology advances, this study provides a new perspective on consumer responses to firms’ collaboration with AI. We propose that perceived humaneness and innovativeness may be important variables to explain both negative and positive consumer responses to companies’ use of generative AI.
People have implicit theories about whether personal characteristics, such as intelligence or personality, are fixed or grow with individual effort, and these implicit theories have been known to influence people’s goal setting and related behaviors. By applying the implicit theory of intelligence to preference, we noted that individuals differ in their implicit theories about the changeability of food preferences. In an online survey of 200 Korean adults, existing scales were used to measure implicit theories about the changeability of food preferences, variety seeking tendency with respect to foods, satisfaction with food-related life, and overall life satisfaction in turn. The results of serial mediation analysis showed that having the incremental theory in food preference is related to higher food variety seeking, which leads to satisfaction with food-related life and overall life satisfaction. As for the effect of the implicit theory of food preferences on overall life satisfaction, only the indirect effect was found to be significant. We measured food variety seeking by both tendency and objective food frequency, but only variety seeking tendency showed the serial mediation effect. The contributions and implications of the results were discussed.
Consumers are often faced with purchasing situations for products/services that require expertise, are complicated or complex, and are difficult to evaluate and compare prices. Incomplete or unbalanced information of consumers leads to perception of uncertainty. In high uncertainty purchase situations, consumers feel unsure about making a good choice and thus hesitate or postpone the purchase. This paper started from the question of how to make consumers feel more confident in their choice so that they do not hesitate to purchase. The study expected that an instantaneous activation of confidence, independent of the level of consumer’s expertise in the product/service, would increase purchase intention. The paper tested the hypothesis that a pre-purchase manipulation of choice behavior would activate decision confidence and that activated confidence would influence purchase intention. Two experiments were conducted using purchase scenarios of products/services with high uncertainty (wine and financial investment products). For the choice behavior manipulation, a pre-purchase sweepstakes was used. In each scenario, the study distinguished between a group that actively chose the sweepstakes entry and a group that was passively given the entry and compared their confidence. The results showed that manipulating preceding choice behavior affects decision confidence and that confidence affects purchase intention even after controlling for product/service expertise. The contribution of this study is that it addresses the effect of choice behavior in a high uncertainty purchase situation and sheds new light on the effect of choice behavior manipulation on confidence in the context of consumer behavior research.
Upcycling products are recognized for their eco-friendly value in that they create new value by recycling waste that would otherwise be discarded, so they tend to be sold at higher prices than conventional products. Therefore, in this study, we propose that consumers’ perceived price fairness of upcycling products can play as an important role on purchase intention as their environmental value. We also expected that negative perceptions of waste as a material for upcycling products would transfer to the product, and would negatively affect price fairness and eco-friendliness, resulting in decreased purchase intention. In Study 1, we found that contamination perception of material were negatively correlated with purchase intentions for upcycling products, and that this relationship was mediated by reduced perceived price fairness and environmental friendliness. In Study 2, we sought to determine whether nostalgia moderate the negative effects of perceived contamination, manipulating perceived contamination of the material (waste) between groups. The results showed that there was no difference in the high contamination group, but only in the low contamination group did activated nostalgia enhance perceived price fairness and environmental friendliness of upcycling products. These findings suggest that presenting raw materials of upcycling product together in advertising can sometimes backfire through consumers’ perceived contamination. It also suggests that price fairness may be as important as eco-friendliness in upcycling products, and that activating nostalgia can increase both eco-friendliness and price fairness perceptions.