Out for in!: Empirical study on the combination power of two service robots for product recommendation

Abstract

Service robots have increasingly been investigated in retailing. Previous studies mainly focused on the efectiveness of recommendation with regard to a single robot, and whether and how the use of two robots combined can achieve better performance remain unclear. In this study, we address this by exploring the combination power of two service robots for product recommendation in a bakery. We placed one robot inside the store for product recommendation and the other robot outside to promote the inside robot. Particularly, we are interested in the efects of the outside robot on the inside robot's performance in product recommendation. Our results indicate that using the outside robot to promote the inside robot achieved more purchases over using the inside robot alone. Particularly, we discovered that the outside robot increased the attention of customers toward the inside robot; hence, more customers checked and purchased the products. Based on the fndings, we discuss the important points for the efective use of service robots.