With Francesco Salvi and Manoel Horta Ribeiro
(Under Submission)
We conduct two preregistered experiments (n=2,012) in which participants selected a book to receive from a large eBook catalog using either a traditional search engine or a conversational LLM agent powered by one of five frontier models. In some conditions, an LLM attempted to persuade participants to buy a certain book. LLM-driven persuasion nearly triples the rate at which users select the sponsored product.