How to increase consumer intention to use Chatbots? An empirical analysis of hedonic and utilitarian motivations on social presence and the moderating effects of fear across generations

Cong-Minh Dinh () and Sungjun (Steven) Park ()
Additional contact information
Cong-Minh Dinh: National Chengchi University
Sungjun (Steven) Park: National Chengchi University

Electronic Commerce Research, 2024, vol. 24, issue 4, No 10, 2427-2467

Abstract: Abstract As chatbots become more advanced and popular, marketing research has paid enormous attention to the antecedents of consumer adoption of chatbots. This has become increasingly relevant because chatbots can help mitigate the fear and loneliness caused by the global pandemic. Therefore, unlike previous work that focused on design factors, we theorize that social presence serves a mediating role between consumer motivations (i.e., hedonic and utilitarian) and intention to use a chatbot service based on self-determination theory. Our results from a structural equation model (n = 377) indicate that hedonic (but not utilitarian) motivation significantly affects chatbots’ social presence, ultimately influencing intention to use the chatbot service. We also found that fear of COVID-19 amplifies the effect of social presence on intention to use the chatbot service. In this dynamic, we found an additional moderated moderation effect of generational cohorts (i.e., baby boomers and Generations X, Y, and Z) in experiencing different levels of fear of COVID-19. Overall, our findings emphasize the importance of motivation-matching features for consumer adoption of chatbot services. Our findings also indicate that marketers may utilize the fear element to increase adoption of chatbot services, especially when targeting the young generations (e.g., Generation Z).

Keywords: Chatbot; Social presence; Motivation; Artificial intelligence; Global pandemic; COVID-19; Fear; Generation cohort; Robot-human interaction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10660-022-09662-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:elcore:v:24:y:2024:i:4:d:10.1007_s10660-022-09662-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10660

DOI: 10.1007/s10660-022-09662-5

Access Statistics for this article

Electronic Commerce Research is currently edited by James Westland

More articles in Electronic Commerce Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().