Academic Events

Topic:

Time&Date: 

10:30 am -12:00 pm, February 21, 2025 (Friday)

Venue

Room D504, Teaching Complex D Building

Speaker:

Song Lin

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

To explore the potential of Generative AI to enhance consumer decision making in E-commerce, we build an online shopping platform where consumers can conduct product searches and make purchase decisions, and design a chatbot assistant, powered by Large Language Models (LLM), that can help them shop on the platform. We conduct incentive-aligned experiments to evaluate the impacts of the AI chatbot on consumer shopping behaviors. Contrary to our expectation that the chatbot assistant can help consumers process information more efficiently and thus expedite the shopping process, we find that it actually increases consumers’ shopping time. We further explore the underlying mechanism and find that the chatbot can encourage consumers to search more intensively (i.e., within-product inspection) and search with deeper concentration, while also marginally prompting them to search more extensively (i.e., cross-product search). Furthermore, the chatbot can help consumers reduce information overload, improve their shopping experience, and increase their purchase likelihood.Keywords: Generative AI, LLM, chatbot, consumer search, information overload

Biography:

Song Lin is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He holds a PhD in Marketing from MIT. His research interests include product and pricing, platform design, new products, advertising, Generative AI, consumer learning and search.  His research has appeared on Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and Management Science. He has won the 2013 INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition, the finalist for the 2015 John Little Award for the best marketing paper published in Marketing Science and Management Science, and the 2020 Weitz-Winer-O'Dell Award, which recognizes the JMR article that has made the most significant long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice. He is also the awardee of the 2021 Marketing Science Institute (MSI) Young Scholar. Lin has been serving as the associate editor of Marketing Science since 2022 and is an editorial board member of Journal of Marketing Research.