Providing healthcare shopping advice through knowledge-based virtual agents

Abstract

Knowledge-based virtual shopping agents, that advise their users about which products to buy, are well used in technical markets such as healthcare e-commerce. To ensure the proper adoption of this technology, it is important to consider aspects of users’ psychology early in the software design process. When traditional adoption models such as UTAUT-2 work well for many technologies, they overlook important specificities of the healthcare e-commerce domain and of knowledge-based virtual agents technology. Drawing upon health information technology and virtual agent literature, we propose a complementary adoption model incorporating new predictors and moderators reflecting these domains’ specificities. The model is tested using 903 observations gathered through an online survey conducted in collaboration with a major actor in the herbal medicine market. Our model can serve as a basis for many phases of the knowledge-based agents software development. We propose actionable recommendations for practitioners and ideas for further research.