From Product Search to Preference Articulation: The Economics of Agentic Commerce

Generative AI is shifting digital commerce from browsing toward agentic search, in which consumers delegate product discovery to AI agents. We compare manual search, which accurately evaluates a limited product set, with agentic search, which screens a broad catalog through noisy representations of preferences and products. Preference complexity is the number of satisfaction-relevant dimensions that are difficult to articulate before search but readily evaluated upon inspection. Consumers have finite attention and choose search intensity: products inspected manually or preference-refinement depth with an agent. We obtain three findings. First, manual search collapses beyond a finite complexity threshold: inspection ceases, mismatch reaches the no-search benchmark, and platform revenue falls to zero. Agentic search avoids this collapse. Once refinement becomes worthwhile, it remains worthwhile as complexity rises; mismatch stays below the no-search benchmark and revenue remains positive, although articulation effort and mismatch may increase. Second, platforms rank the regimes by conversion revenue, whereas consumers also bear search expenditure. When manual inspection is sufficiently inexpensive, agentic search becomes revenue-superior before consumers voluntarily adopt it, creating an adoption lag in which consumers rationally continue manual search. Third, conditional on agentic participation, platforms may assign lower fidelity to consumers with larger attention budgets because they can offset noisier representations through additional refinement, yielding an inverted fidelity allocation. Agentic commerce thus shifts scarcity from product inspection to preference articulation, making consumers' willingness and ability to interact central to voluntary use and platform fidelity design.

The Dynamic Verifiable Multi-Agent Human Agentic Loyalty Loop (DVM-HALL) Model and the Net Human-Agent Score (NHAS) in Autonomous Commerce

The rapid proliferation of Agentic Artificial Intelligence fundamentally disrupts traditional customer loyalty paradigms. As AI evolves from passive recommendation algorithms to autonomous, goal-directed agents capable of executing purchasing decisions, the conventional understanding of consumer-brand relationships requires a structural reevaluation. By synthesizing extant literature across human-machine teaming, consumer decision-making, and algorithmic trust dynamics, we demonstrate that traditional loyalty models fail to account for algorithmic bounded rationality and constructed autonomy. To address this, we introduce the Dynamic Verifiable Multi-Agent Human Agentic Loyalty Loop (DVM-HALL) model. We formalize brand choice via a softmax probability formulation where human emotional equity, agentic machine-experience utility, calibrated trust, delegated authority, and verifiable execution jointly determine selection. The model features recursive updating mechanisms to dynamically calibrate trust and delegation after each interaction. Crucially, the framework integrates a verifiable execution layer for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and tokenized loyalty settings, incorporating execution risks -- such as gas costs, slippage, MEV exposure, and smart-contract vulnerabilities -- as core predictors of agentic brand preference. Furthermore, we introduce the Net Human-Agent Score (NHAS), an auditable, risk-weighted metric designed to measure human-agent alignment using human feedback, execution logs, benchmark comparisons, and verifiable receipts. Finally, we propose a comprehensive three-stage empirical validation plan spanning controlled shopping experiments, multi-agent market simulations, and DeFi testbeds. This framework provides the foundational theory required for brands to navigate the impending transition toward machine customers.