Hedonic Motivation of Chatbot Usage - Wizard-of-Oz Study based on Face Analysis and User Self-Assessment

摘要

Ever since, the Internet enabled conversations by supporting interactive features and the presentation of product-or service-related information accumulated on websites, micro pages or portals. More recently, especially user groups of younger generations turn towards messaging applications for communication. Companies adjust to this trend of more messaging-oriented forms of interaction by implementing new channels of customer communication such as chatbots. In this work, a comparative analysis is conducted to uncover the impact of using traditional websites or chatbots for promoting a product in an impulse purchase situation with special attention to hedonic motivation. The aim is to measure the impact of the information delivery option (website or chatbot) on the customers' emotions as expression of hedonic motivation. More specifically, this paper is addressed to answering the question whether chatbot utilization result in a different hedonic motivation and in turn a higher manifestation of positive emotions than tradition website usage. The chatbot-based scenario is implemented by using a Wizard-of-Oz (WOz) experimental approach. The results provide first insights on the effects of chatbot usage on emotions in electronic commerce environments: while the chatbot users showed slightly higher happiness scores, no statistically significant impact could be discovered and there does not seem to be a statistically significant influence of chatbot usage on the purchase decision.