arXiv subjects

Benjamin Tannenbaum

Publications and source records attributed to Benjamin Tannenbaum.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Purchase Advice and Observable Buyer Responses in Real AI Conversations

How often does a generative assistant persuade someone to buy, or persuade them not to buy? Conversation logs contain recommendations, but they do not necessarily record subsequent decisions. We audit 317 historical interactions from Aiso's proprietary research database of licensed, consent-based, de-identified conversations with commercially available AI assistants. Single-agent AI-assisted screening identifies 68 purchase-directed records; collapsing one shared-prefix copy yields 67 retained episodes, dated April 2023 to July 2025. Assistant responses provide candidate options, acquisition channels, or conditional preferences in 52 episodes (77.6%). One episode contains conditional redirection away from a named accommodation candidate. No episode is coded as advice to abandon or defer the purchase category. Only 18 episodes (26.9%) contain a subsequent user turn within the same purchase-related mission, compared with 23 (34.3%) that contain any later user turn. Using conversation depth alone therefore overstates this follow-up availability by 27.8%. Across 47 retained user follow-up messages, no explicit post-advice purchase commitment, completed-purchase report, or purchase-category abandonment statement is observed. These zeros describe recorded statements, not conversion or persuasion rates. The paper supplies operational definitions, text-free annotations, and reproducible descriptive results. Its central finding is a measurement limitation: recommendation content is observable much more often than a buyer's subsequent decision. The selected historical sample, unvalidated AI annotations, and missing transaction outcomes do not support a population-level or causal estimate of persuasion.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Beyond the Final Prompt: Measuring the Effect of Within-Conversation Context on AI Answers

An isolated final user message is often treated as the query in evaluations of AI systems. In a conversation, however, the actionable request may be distributed across preceding turns. We directly test whether that omitted within-conversation context changes answers. For each of 180 English multi-turn conversations sampled from a governed commercial corpus and the public PRISM dataset, we hold the final user message and requested answer model constant while generating three answers: one from the full role-labelled conversation, one from the final message alone, and one from the final message plus a prefix-only reconstruction capped at 160 words. A separately requested judge model evaluates answers under randomized labels. The prespecified primary endpoint is a material difference that could change what the user does, rather than a difference in style or detail. After inverse-probability weighting to the eligible cohorts, the full-conversation and isolated-final answers differ materially in 44.7% of cases (95% bootstrap CI 33.8% to 56.1%). Full-conversation answers score 0.49 points higher on a 0 to 4 request-satisfaction scale (0.32 to 0.67). Adding the compressed prefix reduces the material-difference rate to 30.8% (20.2% to 42.1%), a 13.9-point reduction (4.9% to 24.1%), and reduces the mean satisfaction gap to 0.01 points (-0.12 to 0.13). Yet compression is not equivalent to the complete dialogue context: almost one third of answers remain materially different. An order-swapped repeat on 48 cases yields 91.7% agreement and kappa = 0.83 for the primary decision. The study concerns preceding turns in the same conversation and does not test persistent memory across separate conversations.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

The Prompt Is Not the Query: How Request State Evolves Across Multi-Turn AI Conversations

AI-search evaluation commonly treats a prompt as a stable query that can be counted, classified, and replayed in isolation. A conversation makes that unit of analysis questionable: each user turn can add a constraint, revise an assumption, request evidence, or refer to alternatives established earlier. We replace latent "intent" with an observable construct, conversation-conditioned request state, and measure how that state is distributed across user turns. The analysis reuses frozen rules and the governed cohort of a preceding conversation study: 670 English commercial multi-turn conversations in a discovery-replication design and 7,463 public PRISM conversations from 1,389 participants. In the commercial corpus, the final prompt contains a median 35.6% of the session's unique user-side content vocabulary; in PRISM, the median is 36.4%. The final prompt contains at most half of that vocabulary in 68.4% and 74.3% of conversations, respectively. More importantly, transparent rules detect at least one request-state dimension in history but not in the final prompt in 50.3% of commercial conversations and 44.8% of PRISM conversations. Among dimension-bearing conversations, the final prompt reproduces the full observed dimension set in only 26.1% and 26.2%. At the same time, the final prompt adds a previously unseen dimension in 17.9% and 19.3%, showing that the endpoint is neither a summary nor merely a reference: it is often another state update. Length-matched nulls show that low lexical coverage is largely a consequence of turn length, so vocabulary results are interpreted as information availability, not semantic drift. The categorical results support session-level measurement for AI search. They do not estimate the causal effect of history on model answers.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Answer-Reconstruction Search Density: Measuring the Query and Source Work Compressed by Conversational Answers

Conversational systems can collapse a visible sequence of web queries, result inspections, and source comparisons into a single synthesized answer. Existing retrieval metrics evaluate ranking, effort, or factual support, but they do not quantify the minimum conventional search work represented by a completed answer. We define answer-reconstruction search density (\ARSD): the minimum number of distinct query actions required, under a fixed and dated reconstruction policy, to support a target share of atomic retrievable answer units. A parallel page-density measure separates query compression from source compression.

cs.IR↗