Type: article
Abstract: Autonomous AI agents are beginning to browse, evaluate, and purchase products on behalf of consumers, raising a question for agentic commerce: do marketing strategies designed for humans influence machine shoppers, and do they affect search as well as choice? We build a sandboxed e-commerce environment with nine marketing cues drawn from 24 retail sites and run 23,015 trials across three models from two providers. Marketing cues affect product selection, but their effectiveness varies across cues and models; in the primary model, a Best Seller Badge raises target selection to 70.0% from 11.5% in control. Relative cue effectiveness shows both convergence and divergence from patterns documented in prior consumer research. More importantly, stronger selection effects are systematically associated with less exploration before commitment. We characterize this inverse relationship as the diagnosticity–exploration tradeoff, showing that marketing can shape not only what an AI agent chooses but how far it searches before choosing.
Authors: Lee, Suhyeon, Shin, Donghyuk, Han, Sang Pil
Language: English
Topic: AI in Service Interactions
Subfield: Marketing
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222990181