(Im)Balanced customer-oriented behaviors and AI chatbots' Efficiency–Flexibility performance: The moderating role of customers’ rational choices

Artificial intelligence (AI) based chatbots are increasingly deployed in frontline encounters, because they combine frontline service efficiency and flexibility. Using a large-scale data set with more than 130,000 man–machine dialogues from an e-bike sharing platform, Study 1 reveals a complex relationship between chatbots' customer-oriented behaviors and their efficiency–flexibility ambidexterity. Chatbots' level of efficiency–flexibility ambidexterity is higher when their functional and relational customer-oriented behaviors are balanced rather than imbalanced (i.e., a negative imbalance effect) and when they are balanced at a higher rather than a lower level (i.e., a positive balance effect). A follow-up experiment, Study 2, and online survey, Study 3, consistently show that the negative imbalance effect is stronger as customers' perceptions of non-personalization costs decrease and privacy concerns increase, while opportunity cost has no significant influence on the negative imbalance effect. However, consistent with rational choice theory, the positive balance effect is stronger as non-personalization costs increase, privacy concerns decrease, and opportunity cost decreases. In addition, Study 1 and 3 consistently show that in alignment with the stimulus–organism–response framework, efficiency–flexibility ambidexterity partially mediates the relationship between chatbots’ (im)balanced customer-oriented behaviors and customer patronage. This study contributes to the literature on frontline ambidexterity by introducing an AI application context and a more nuanced nonlinear view of the antecedents and consequences of frontline ambidexterity.     

Contraction under minimum wages? Operational and financial advantages of multinational subsidiaries in China

The advantages of multinational enterprises (MNEs) over domestic firms have been widely acknowledged in several streams of literature. However, a more refined analysis on the sources of their advantages is lacking. Exploiting minimum wage hikes in China as an exogenous shock, we theorize that, due to multinational advantages, the employment of multinational subsidiaries may be less affected by minimum wages than that of domestic firms, and that their multinational advantages arise from both operational and financial advantages. Using nation-wide longitudinal firm data from 1998 to 2007 and border discontinuity design (BDD) to estimate the causal effects, we find supportive evidence for our hypotheses. We contribute to the literature on multinational advantages and minimum wages.