Information Overload in Voice-Based Alexa Shopping: Does Customer Involvement Play a Role?: An Abstract

Digital Personal Assistants (DPAs) have become an essential component of our lives, supporting such daily tasks as setting up and maintaining schedules, operating home appliances, controlling “smart” electronic devices, providing communication, information and entertainment, and offering companionship. The number of DPAs worldwide is expected to increase from 4.2 billion units in 2020 to 8.4 billion by 2024 (Statista 2020). Their popularity among consumers can be explained by the intuitive and easy, command-triggered voice interface based on natural language processing software that creates an impression of social presence and offers efficient task assistance and companionship. While consumers are increasingly adopting DPAs for voice-based shopping, with over 21 million people expected to have made a DPA-assisted purchase in 2021 (eMarketer 2020), this process faces a fundamental challenge due to the limited human information processing capacity in the context of audio-linguistic communication (Palma et al. 2020). Given the dearth of research on consumer information processing during DPA-assisted shopping and decision-making, it is essential to understand the nature, causes, and boundary conditions of voice-shopping IO to assist developers and retailers in offering optimal solutions to their customers. This pioneering study presents a pilot test of the roles of product information complexity and consumer product involvement on IO, perceived decision quality, satisfaction and buying decision in the context of voice-shopping using the Amazon Alexa DPA. The results of a voice shopping experiment confirmed differential roles of cognitive and affective dimensions of consumer involvement in moderating the impact of information overload on shopping decisions. Specifically, we found that consumers who are more cognitively involved with the product experience lower information overload when presented with product information characterized by high complexity (greater number of product attributes), potentially employing a central information processing route. On the other hand, consumers who are more emotionally involved with the product are more likely to purchase the suggested product when presented with a high complexity product information, potentially activating a peripheral information processing route. We also confirm the negative impact of information overload on perceived decision confidence and satisfaction, supporting earlier findings in different contexts.