Examining User Experience of Conversational Agents in Hedonic Digital Services – Antecedents and the Role of Psychological Ownership

Conversational agents (CA) that interact with usersin human language have become increasingly pop-ular over the past years. This study explores ante-cedents of the user experience with CAs in hedonicdigital services, utilizing the example of musicstreaming services. Moreover, this study investi-gates whether a positive CA user experience in-creases users’ sense of psychological ownership to-wards the service, which in turn is supposed to pos-itively influence users’ intention to use the service’sfee required premium version. Using structuralequation modelling, the results indicate that per-ceived humanness and perceived personalization ofthe CA positively affect the user experience. The re-sults also show that CAs can greatly benefit fromhigher humanness and personalization when userstrust the hedonic digital service. Furthermore, psy-chological ownership has been identified as an un-derlying mechanism through which CA user experi-ence leads to users’ premium usage intention, indi-cating that CAs might be valuable for hedonic digi-tal services.