The Effects of Interaction Strategy and Robot Intent on Shopping Behavior

Abstract

There is a growing interest in the retail industry to deploy service robots for customer interactions. Deploying such customer-facing robots raises the question of how we want to interact with these robots and reveals concerns that businesses and marketers could use robots to manipulate consumers. In this experiment, 67 study participants interacted with different virtual shopping robots that tried to impact "shoppers" purchasing decisions. The results indicate that a robot can increase consumer spending. The study exemplifies how a collaborative robot could be used as a customer-serving robot in a retail environment and investigates the impact of (i) different interaction strategies (human vs robot control) and (ii) dark patterns on shopping behavior (manipulative vs supportive robot).