This dissertation explores how emergent technologies influence consumer experience and market behavior. The first chapter of the dissertation, “The Effect of Implementing Chatbot Customer Service on Stock Returns: An Event Study Analysis,” employs the event study method to examine how the implementation of customer service chatbots impacts firm value. I find that investors respond positively to chatbot implementation and that Business-to-Business (B2B) companies have significantly more to gain from this service innovation compared to Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies. However, anthropomorphizing chatbots attenuates this positive financial impact for B2B companies, suggesting differences in expectations and preferences of B2C and B2B customers. A survey of investors and a consumer experiment provide additional evidence for these relationships. While prior research suggests that Artificial Intelligence (AI) implementation may have a negative impact on firm value, using the example of AI chatbots, this research provides the first evidence that investors respond favorably to a customer-centric application of AI. In addition, it broadens the predominant consumer-focused lens of the marketing literature on AI to include B2B customer and investor perspectives. Further, while marketing research has primarily viewed anthropomorphism as a categorical variable, I propose an anthropomorphism index that offers a more nuanced approach to examining the anthropomorphism of AI technology.In the second chapter, “Understanding Antagonistic Consumer Behavior Toward Humanlike Robots in the Marketplace,” I examine consumer antagonism toward service robots and contribute theoretically and substantively to the emerging marketing literature on AI. Using carefully designed experiments, I demonstrate that consumers tend to dehumanize and, consequently, behave antagonistically toward humanoid (vs. non-humanoid) service robots. While prior research shows that people avoid humanoid robots, this research is the first to show that consumers dehumanize and subsequently engage in anti-normative, negative approach behavior when such robots are deployed in customer-facing service roles. Furthermore, this research contributes to the dehumanization literature by demonstrating that dehumanization is a two-step process when applied to service technology. Importantly, the findings help reconcile the contradiction between the literature on anthropomorphism and the uncanny valley hypothesis by demonstrating that consumers receive humanoid (vs. non-humanoid) robots more positively when the effect of dehumanization is mitigated.

In two thematically related chapters, I explore the benefits incurred as companies actively respond to consumers who share positive word of mouth in digital environments (eWOM). This research takes a multi-method approach by first addressing the psychological impact of company response on the sharing consumer, followed by an examination of real behavioral consequences in a social media setting. Across six studies in Chapter 1, I find support for a conceptual model indicating that consumers who receive a company response to their positive eWOM experience greater satisfaction compared to no response, leading to increased intentions to engage in future positive eWOM on behalf of the company, both through social media and online review websites. Furthermore, I find that consumer perceptions of response personalization lead to judgments of company effort and that these two elements mediate the effect of response on consumer satisfaction. In Chapter 2, using a dataset of firm responses to positive consumer feedback on Twitter (tweets) from 79 apparel retailers, I find that company responses to positive consumer tweets can generate consumer engagement behavior in the form of continued interaction. Company responses that use consumer-oriented language increase the likelihood of consumer interactivity. However, this effectiveness depends on whether the consumer's audience is the company or their broader network of followers. I also show that, in some conditions, companies achieve higher consumer engagement by personalizing responses with the consumer's name. Together, the findings from these two chapters point to the need for companies to strategically practice positive eWOM management, both to promote consumer engagement behaviors and to avoid the negative outcomes associated with unresponsiveness.

In two independent and thematically connected chapters, I investigate consumers' willingness to pay a price premium in response to product development that entails prosocial attributes (PATs), those that allude to the reduction of negative externalities to benefit society, and to an innovative participatory pricing design called 'Pay-What-You-Want' (PWYW) pricing, a mechanism that relinquishes the determination of payments in exchange for private goods to the consumers themselves partly relying on their prosocial preferences to drive positive payments. First, I propose a novel statistical approach built on the choice based contingent valuation technique to estimate incremental willingness to pay (IWTP) for PATs that accounts for consumer heterogeneity, dependence in the decision making processes, and incentive compatibility. I validate the approach by estimating IWTP for a variety of PATs and contrast the theoretical and managerial benefits of using the proposed approach over extant techniques used in the literature for this purpose. Second, I propose a general and flexible statistical modeling framework for estimating PWYW payments that exceed zero. It relies on the joint estimation of three types of consumer decision processes namely, the consumer propensity to default to an explicit price recommendation, the propensity to pay a least legitimate price, and the payment of a freely-chosen non-zero payment. Of particular interest is the model's ability to account for a wide variety of design constraints such as the setting of price bounds, explicit price recommendations, and the provision of a menu of discrete prices to choose from. I validate the approach by estimating PWYW payments for a variety of products such as music licenses, snacks, and sports tickets. I specifically examine and report the differential impact of three managerially controllable variables namely, 'payment anonymity', 'information on payment recipients' and 'information of product value/quality'.