with Rebecca Chae, David Finken, Emir Efendic, and Olesia Nikulina

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the art market, highlighting the importance of understanding how audiences perceive artworks collaboratively created by humans and AI. Current understanding of AI's impact is often limited due to prior research that predominantly examined art as solely human or AI-created. This conceptualization misses the nuances of the human-AI collaborative art making process, which the current research explores. Drawing on art perception research and expert interviews, we offer a novel conceptual framework of how people perceive meaning from human-AI collaborative art. This framework maps AI's role as an active collaborator in the art making process across three stages: Source Capabilities, the Collaborative Creation, and Art Engagement. We use this framework to guide our empirical exploration in seven studies, showing that various factors influence an artwork's perceived meaning and value. For example, the artist's role in finalizing a piece (the "final touch"), the elaborateness of their input (e.g., complex prompts), and their curatorial decision making (e.g., selecting from multiple AI-generated options) increased perceptions of meaning and value. Our findings serve as initial insights researchers can expand upon in future research. These insights offer important implications for artists, and for knowledge and creative industries more generally.

Finken, D., Döring, T., & Hofstetter, R. (2025). Fragile permanence: How NFTs shape perceptions of artistic identity and value. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 10(2), 137-152.

Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) are unique digital assets securely recorded on a blockchain, a characteristic that fundamentally distinguishes them from other digital goods. Building on this characteristic, our research examined how people perceive one-of-a-kind (unique) artworks. Drawing from the literature on permanence and essentialism, we demonstrate that NFTs are often seen as lacking permanence compared to traditional artwork. This perception diminishes their ability to capture an artist’s essential identity, explaining why people prefer traditional on-canvas (over NFT) artwork. However, when an artwork’s permanence is threatened (e.g., by intentional or accidental destruction), NFTs may better preserve value, eventually increasing preferences. We tested our predictions in four experiments (𝑁=1,628) and three replications (𝑁=697). Results enhance our understanding of how technologies (e.g., NFTs) shape the perception of artwork. We expand the limited research on permanence and connect with literature on essentialism, offering insights into why individuals may ascribe value to artwork.

Fan, Y., Döring, T., Li, S., Zhang, X., Fang, M., & Yu, Y. (2024). Energy poverty and public health vulnerability: A multi‐country analysis. Sustainable Development, 32(5), 5161-5180.

Member countries of the United Nations have pledged to ensure access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy for all by 2030 (Sustainable Development Goal 7). However, energy poverty continues to be a significant challenge for billions of people. Empirical research established a connection between energy poverty and traditional public health indicators such as overall mortality rate, but relatively little is known about its holistic impact on public health and in particular on health vulnerability. This research establishes a holistic measure of public health using panel data from 143 countries between 2000 and 2016 to analyze the impact of energy poverty on health vulnerability. Using Ordinary Least-Squares (OLS), fixed effects, system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), and quantile regression approaches, our results show that reducing energy poverty mitigates health vulnerability. Energy poverty amplifies the susceptibility to negative health outcomes (sensitivity) and diminishes a population's capacity to respond to public health crises (resilience). The analysis also reveals a heterogeneous impact of energy poverty on health vulnerability associated with the socio-economic development level of the region, with the largest increase being in more developed and high-income regions.

Nann, L., Finken, D., Döring, T., & Hofstetter, R. (2024). The illusion of luxury: Augmented reality's clash with brand essence. Marketing Review St. Gallen, 41(2), 50-57.

Many luxury brands have ventured into the virtual realm (e.g., metaverse, AR product displays) to showcase their products. However, prior research has failed to empirically test how virtuality affects luxury brand perceptions. Because the fundamental nature of luxury brands (i.e., high quality, exclusivity, prestige, and authenticity) contradicts the characteristics of AR, adverse effects could occur. This research presents two studies demonstrating that displaying luxury products in AR diminishes the brand essence of the focal brand, resulting in a reduction of brand authenticity.

Sokolova, T., Krishna, A., & Döring, T. (2023). Paper meets plastic: The perceived environmental friendliness of product packaging. Journal of Consumer Research, 50(3), 468-491.

Packaging waste makes up more than 10% of the landfilled waste in the United States. While consumers often want to make environmentally friendly product choices, we find that their perceptions of the environmental friendliness of product packaging may systematically deviate from its objective environmental friendliness. Eight studies (N = 4,103) document the perceived environmental friendliness (PEF) bias whereby consumers judge plastic packaging with additional paper to be more environmentally friendly than identical plastic packaging without the paper. The PEF bias is driven by consumers’ “paper = good, plastic = bad” beliefs and by proportional reasoning, wherein packaging with a greater paper-to-plastic proportion is judged as more environmentally friendly. We further show that the PEF bias impacts consumers’ willingness to pay and product choice. Importantly, this bias can be mitigated by a “minimal packaging sticker” intervention, which increases the environmental friendliness perceptions of plastic-only packaging, rendering plastic-packaged products to be preferable to their plastic-plus-paper-packaged counterparts. This research contributes to the packaging literature in marketing and to research on sustainability while offering practical implications for managers and public policy officials.

Jahn, S., Elshiewy, O., Döring, T., & Boztug, Y. (2023). Truthful yet misleading: consumer response to ‘low fat’food with high sugar content. Food Quality and Preference, 109, 104900.

Marketers use nutrition claims to communicate potentially beneficial nutritional properties of their products. Claims may only be used if a product has a specific nutrient profile. A downside of nutrition claims is that consumers tend to overgeneralize their meaning, perceiving a product as healthier than it is. This becomes particularly problematic when claims emphasize low amounts of one nutrient while the product contains high amounts of other, typically unhealthy, unmentioned nutrients—a phenomenon which has received little attention in extant literature. This research examines how consumers perceive food with ‘low fat’ claims in terms of sugar content, and how consumers respond when front-of-package (FOP) nutrition information reveals the high amounts of sugar for that product. The empirical part comprises three different experiments with consumers from the United States (total N = 760). Data were analyzed using ANCOVA to evaluate interaction effects and regression-based mediation analysis to assess the underlying mechanism. Results indicate biased consumer expectations regarding sugar content for products with ‘low fat’ claims. The presence of FOP nutrition labels reveals such claim-induced expectation gaps with nuanced changes in nutrient evaluation and purchase intention. This research provides important implications for consumer food choice. Marketers would be better off avoiding the use of misleading nutrition claims as a food marketing tool to avoid detrimental effects to their consumers and business performance. For public policy implications, this study demonstrates that reductive FOP nutrition labels are effective in mitigating the harm induced by potentially misleading nutrition claims.