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Anthropomorphism in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered devices is being used increasingly frequently in consumer-facing situations (e.g., AI Assistants such as Alexa, virtual agents in websites, call/chat bots, etc.), and therefore, it is essential to understand anthropomorphism in AI both to understand consequences for consumers and to optimize firms' product development and marketing. Extant literature is fragmented across several domains and is limited in the marketing domain. In this review, we aim to bring together the insights from different fields and develop a parsimonious conceptual framework to guide future research in fields of marketing and consumer behavior.

We conduct a review of empirical articles published until November 2021 in Financial Times Top 50 (FT50) journals as well as in 41 additional journals selected across several disciplinary domains: computer science, robotics, psychology, marketing, and consumer behavior.

Based on literature review and synthesis, we propose a three-step guiding framework for future research and practice on AI anthropomorphism.

Our proposed conceptual framework informs marketing and consumer behavior domains with findings accumulated in other research domains, offers important directions for future research, and provides a parsimonious guide for marketing managers to optimally utilize anthropomorphism in AI to the benefit of both firms and consumers.

We contribute to the emerging literature on anthropomorphism in AI in three ways. First, we expedite the information flow between disciplines by integrating insights from different fields of inquiry. Second, based on our synthesis of literature, we offer a conceptual framework to organize the outcomes of AI anthropomorphism in a tidy and concise manner. Third, based on our review and conceptual framework, we offer key directions to guide future research endeavors.

The law-oriented short stories and novels of lawyer/English professor John William Corrington are receiving increasing attention from legal scholars. However, no one has analyzed the science fiction screenplays he co-wrote with his wife, Joyce, from a legal perspective. This article analyzes two such screenplays and concludes that they are “Socratic” texts whose narrative structures and epistemological processes work in much the same way that the traditional participatory exchange works in law school. My analysis explores the links between law, allegory and science fiction as intersecting methods to imagine the possibilities for the future.

In the drama of the evidentiary process, it would hardly be thought exceptional that the judge’s intuition of the formal order of things – which is to say, their sufficient standing-to-reason – should falter when confronted with the sprawling and confused immediacy of stubborn matter-of-fact. The circumstantial given is a bewildering Gordian Knot of data; the analytic legerdemain of localising our attention and following one of its threads cannot reduce the tangle into which it soon recedes. And in comparison to the knot’s multiplicity, our scope for unifying abstraction, or “large-scale” comprehension, is limited and flickering. We possess fragments of intuition, and fragments of formal connection between these fragments. But the panorama is merely agglutinative – the fragments do not congeal into one perfect, self-evident totality. And an offhand remark amongst the lectures of Alfred North Whitehead suggests that this defect is of more than methodological significance – even when one takes one’s example from arithmetic: “the snippet of knowledge that the addition of 1 and 4 produces the same multiplicity as the addition of 2 and 3, seems to me self-evident” (Whitehead, 1968, p. 47). And yet we would disclaim any such self-evidence were larger numbers involved – only skeptically could we hazard a guess. So, he continues, we have recourse to “the indignity of proof,” securing our opinion through the rationality of calculation. Nor is it so much that proof and method are chastening of themselves – the nemesis, the sting of the creatural condition is rather having to prove, the imperfection of finite judgment and the infinite possibility of perfecting it. This predicament was already known to Sophocles; if humanity “holds out” against the overwhelming by its inventiveness, by finding a means in to mêchanoen technas, the machinations of technique, it is because our ultimate condition with regard to the overwhelming is amêchanôs, aporos, resourceless and without means.

In order to emphasize in-depth analyses of individual life stories, seven informants were selected. Since breadth of experience will contribute to a more detailed contextualization of the consumer's use of products in identity negotiation, diversity across informants was emphasized. Interviews generally followed the format as suggested by Thompson, Locander, and Pollio (1989). A comfortable setting was chosen and pseudonyms were used to ensure anonymity. Interviews were audio-taped and lasted anywhere from one to just over two hours. Grand tour questions (McCracken, 1988) focused on the meaning of the tattoo design, the experience of being tattooed, perceptions of the body, words the informants used to describe themselves, and other biographical information important for understanding the informant's personal myth. Every effort was made to present a natural front, keep the informant on track without being too directive, demonstrate active listening, and prompt the informant as a way of probing for details (Spradley, 1979). To ensure accuracy, an experienced and trained transcriptionist transcribed each of the seven interviews. The final text totaled 450 typed double-spaced pages.

First, this chapter traces how the concept of atmosphere has evolved in the fields of theology, philosophy, geography, sociology, psychology and architecture. Then it analyses the question of how to describe atmospheres and how to deepen the perception of atmospheres through market research. Finally, the chapter discusses the possibilities and limits of naming and typologising atmospheres.

This chapter discusses the extent to which the absorptive class has been created as essentially narcissistic in character by the system of capitalist production. Guy Debord, an early critic of a post modern capitalism, argued that capitalism had gone so far in the production of the commodity that society is turned into a mirror or spectacle that represents the kind of void in existence felt at the core of the individuals within it. He also laments the way in which the economy exists for its own sake, rather than for those that live within it and as part of it. In his somewhat incoherent work, The Society of the Spectacle, he writes of the commodity as spectacle, and we find such assertions as (Debord, 1983):“The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.”“The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is not more than the economy developing for itself.”“The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.”

Purpose – This chapter addresses the transformation of patient into consumer, focusing on the specific population of human egg recipients. This work also analyzes medicine, and reproductive medicine and egg donation specifically, as marketplaces, particularly as they function in the Internet environment.

Methodology – This chapter utilizes a content analysis of egg donation related websites using both inductive and deductive coding schemes.

Findings – Egg donation related websites and their practices do indeed fit the model of a reproductive medicine marketplace, particularly those practices related to marketing strategies and cost.

Originality/value – This work focuses on the Internet as a primary location for a reproductive medicine marketplace, and develops a new understanding of the ways in which consumers are transformed by and operate in this market. It also demonstrates the emerging need for policy to govern this marketplace.

Through social media communities, politicians communicate personal or even private information and seek to take advantage of the possibilities to connect with both influential personalities and ordinary people. Politicians' Instagram use can be understood as a way of producing visual flows of professional, personal and private practices.

The current research seeks to compare the ways in which the leaders of the three major political parties in Greece (New Democracy, SYRIZA and KINAL) form their ‘image’ through their Instagram posts during a multiple consecutive elections (pre-)electoral period (2019 European, Prefectural/Municipal and general elections) and a nonelectoral period (2018), in order to trace similarities and differences in the communication strategies of the abovementioned politicians during these periods. Among others, politicians post private aspects of their lives during both periods; they focus predominantly on the formation of a positive self-image, instead of attacking their political opponents and increase the number of personal images during the (pre-)electoral period of our study.