The Role of Ease-of-Return Experience on Contingent Free Shipping Policies
Contingent free shipping (CFS) policies, whereby consumers get free shipping if their orders exceed a certain amount, are commonplace. A CFS policy aims to nudge customers to place larger orders by adding additional items and/or buying more expensive items (order-swelling). However, a less desirable possible outcome is that customers pad their
orders to avoid paying the shipping fee but then return the opportunistic/impulse-purchase items later (return-swelling).
Three Strategic Bets on AI’s Future
This paper examines competition in the consumer AI assistant market using worldwide iOS and Android app-store data from seven major AI assistants from May 2023 through December 2025. Rather than finding a winner-take-all market, we show that major product launches tend to coincide with growth in the overall category, with little evidence of direct cannibalization across leading models. In other words, the “AI war” appears less zero-sum than commonly assumed.
The Caring Machine: Feeling AI for Customer Care
Feeling skills have always been a human domain, but AI is advancing rapidly. This article shows how AI can be used to develop feeling intelligence and build empathetic customer relationships.