AI Empathy in Agentic Commerce
When a machine understands you, do you buy differently?
We study how empathy in AI shopping agents influences consumer trust, product choice, decision satisfaction, and reliance. Our experiments examine when empathic AI helps, or inappropriately influences, consumers across functional, hedonic, mass-market, luxury, low-involvement, and high-involvement purchases.
About the programme
We study how AI empathy shapes consumer decision-making as shopping becomes agentic, delegated to AI assistants that search, compare, and recommend on our behalf.
Our experiments map the boundaries of empathy's power: when consumers rely on empathic AI for decision support, when machines outperform humans at emotional connection, and how empathy's effects shift across product worlds: functional versus experiential, mass versus luxury, low versus high involvement.
The goal is a precise map of where empathy moves the consumer, and where it leaves them unmoved.
Working paperSSRN
The Right Time for AI Empathy in Voice Commerce: Attribution Processes and Product Category Shape Decision Satisfaction
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