2026年9月18日（周五）10:00-12:00 张晗 （香港浸会大学）

 

讲座系列: 数字经济与数字贸易理论与实践系列讲座第11场（学科发展系列讲座总期第131场）

 

讲座人：张晗 （香港浸会大学）

 

时间：2026年9月18日（周五）10:00-12:00

 

地点：求索楼213

 

主持人：屈启兴（对外经贸大学国际经济贸易学院电子商务学系教授）

 

讲座题目：When AI Summarizes Reviews: Do Consumers Seek Reviews Less or Just Differently?

 

讲座摘要：Before reaching a final purchase decision, consumers often seek information by reading additional reviews to better understand a product or service. Review platforms have introduced various interventions to reduce information overload and facilitate access, such as identifying high-quality individual reviews through crowd-sourced helpfulness voting and ranking them prominently. The latest such intervention is AI-generated summaries, which present key insights in a concise, readable overview synthesized from all individual reviews. Despite their growing prevalence and their potential to ease information overload, we know little about how these summaries actually shape consumers’ information seeking. We investigate how and why AI-generated summaries influence consumers’ review seeking, distinguishing between two dimensions: how much information consumers seek, reflected by the likelihood of seeking more reviews, and how they seek it, reflected by their position along a continuum anchored by purposeful seeking at one end and exploratory seeking at the other. Drawing upon literature on information seeking, exposure, and goal orientation motive, we hypothesize that AI-generated summaries reduce both the likelihood of seeking more reviews and the likelihood of adopting an exploratory （relative to purposeful） seeking strategy. Across three complementary laboratory experiments, however, we find a surprising dissociation between the two dimensions: although AI-generated summaries were evaluated as more helpful and trustworthy, they did not reduce consumers’ likelihood of seeking additional reviews. Instead, they reduced consumers’ likelihood of using the exploratory （relative to purposeful） seeking strategy. These findings reveal that AI-generated summaries do not necessarily influence whether （or how much） consumers seek more information, but do influence how they do so. More broadly, our findings show that information seeking comprises two distinct dimensions, advance understanding of the pre-purchase decision-making stage, and shed light on how AI-generated summaries shape consumer behavior on online review platforms.

 

主讲人简介：

张晗博士现任香港浸会大学工商管理学院院长和信息系统讲座教授。他曾担任美国佐治亚理工学院商学院信息技术管理终身教授，Steven A. Denning技术与管理讲座教授。张晗教授于德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校取得信息系统博士学位，主要研究领域为网上信任和声誉、在线口碑、人机交互和在线医疗。他的学术论文发表在MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Production and Operations Management等国际顶级期刊。张晗教授的研究成果曾被中国的《第一财经日报》和美国的《华尔街日报》专题报道。张晗教授目前担任国际著名学术期刊Information & Management 的主编（Editor-in-Chief），并担任MIS Quarterly的高级编辑（Senior Editor）。作为联合创始人，张晗教授在2007年创办了China Summer Workshop on Information Management（CSWIM）。张晗教授在2023年荣获AIS （Association for Information Systems） Fellow奖，在2025年荣获INFORMS ISS （Information Systems Society） Distinguished Fellow 奖。他是国际信息系统领域首位同时获得AIS Fellow 和INFORMS ISS Distinguished Fellow两项殊荣的华人学者。