Investigating the Effects of Intelligent Products on Psychological Ownership

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the impact of smart objects on
consumer behaviour, particularly how they negatively influence psychological
ownership (PO) and purchase intention. Moreover, this thesis tries to identify
ways to mitigate these negative effects in order to remove the barriers to
consumers’ adoption of such potentially beneficial autonomous products.
Research to date on consumer artificial intelligence (AI) and related smart
products has focused mainly on chatbots (e.g. Shumanov & Johnson, 2021),
service robots (e.g. El Halabi & Trendel, 2024) and online contexts, such as
music streaming (e.g. Sinclair & Tinson, 2017), with few researchers tackling
more-mainstream physical autonomous home products (e.g. smart cookers and
fridges). In particular, research to date has yet to empirically investigate
consumers’ perceptions of autonomous shopping systems (ASSs). Further, Raff,
Rose and Huynh (2020) highlight that existing research has not addressed which
features of autonomous products should (and should not) be incorporated into
the design of such products. The current research aimed to address these gaps
by focusing on understanding how the autonomous nature of an autonomous
home product influences consumers’ perceptions.
This research fills gaps in the existing literature by providing empirical
evidence on how autonomous home products influence consumers’ purchase
intentions, through perceived control and consumers’ sense of PO over the
autonomous product. In terms of methodology, previous research (Stoner,
Loken & Blank, 2018) used an experimental design to examine whether naming
products increases consumers’ sense of PO. Schweitzer, Gollnhofer and de
Bellis (2019) also used an experimental design to investigate consumers’
perceptions of ASSs. The current research also adopted experimental studies to
address these important gaps. Two crucial research questions were generated
and addressed in this research: 1) What influence does the different levels of the
autonomous technologies have on PO and purchase intention of consumers? and
2) what specific design features can mitigate the negative effects of product
autonomy on perceived control, PO and purchase intention? There were two
research aims: 1) to understand the effects of different types of autonomous
technologies (i.e. an autonomous product and an ASS) on consumers’
perceptions of PO and purchase intentions and 2) to understand how to reduce
the negative effect of product autonomy on purchase intention through
perceived control and PO.
Across three experimental studies, this research empirically investigated the
relationships among autonomous objects, perceived control, PO and purchase
intention. There are five main findings. First, product autonomy negatively
influences consumers’ purchase intentions mediated through PO. Second, ASSs
additionally reduce PO when the product has a low level of autonomy, but not
when the product has a high level of autonomy. Third, the negative effect of
product autonomy on PO is mediated via consumers’ perceived control over the
autonomous product. Thus, the negative effect of product autonomy on
purchase intention is serially mediated by perceived control and PO. Fourth,
assigning a human first name (vs. a nickname) to an autonomous product leads
to an increase in consumers’ perceived control, PO and purchase intentions. At
the same time, letting consumers name the product leads to more positive
outcomes than having the company assign a name to the product. Fifth, the
results show that high levels of interactivity in autonomous products mitigate
the negative effects of high product autonomy on perceived control, PO and
purchase intention. Moreover, the results show that autonomous products with
low levels of interactivity can benefit from making whatever interactivity
features available more tangible (i.e. more visible to the consumer).
Using this research’s findings, the negative impacts of product autonomy on
consumers can be addressed by managers. Moreover, this research shows that
allowing consumers, rather than the company, to assign a name to an
autonomous product led to increased purchase intentions. Therefore, this study
advises companies to invite consumers to name their autonomous products,
instead of doing it themselves. Lastly, naming an autonomous product with a
human first name helps to shore up consumers’ sense of PO towards the
product.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Supervisor	Siwan Mitchelmore (Supervisor), Edward Shiu (Supervisor) & Louise Hassan (Supervisor)