It was a pleasure to have Anne-Kathrin Klesse at our department. She is Professor of Consumer Behavior at Erasmus and is also the Academic Director of the Psychology of AI lab at the Erasmus Centre for Data Analytics and serves as the co-chair of the Marketing Management department.
This research explores how trust evolves as services move from familiar settings into new, extended domains. Using an inductive approach, the study identifies key factors that contribute to the success of AI-driven services. These insights are then connected to existing literature, particularly attribution theory.
The findings reveal an interesting pattern: when services extend into new domains, the decline in trust is less pronounced for AI than for human providers. In other words, people’s trust in AI remains relatively more stable compared to their trust in humans when entering unfamiliar territory.
