Basierend auf einem Onlineexperiment mit 206 Teilnehmern untersucht die Dissertation, wie Konsumenten im Internet nach Informationen zu hochwertigen Produkten suchen und welche Rolle dabei virtuelle Verkaufsberater (elektronische Agenten) spielen. Im Kontext eines online Kamerakaufes mit Hilfe eines virtuellen Agenten wird der Erklärungswert traditioneller Faktoren der Informationssuche für das Onlinemedium untersucht. Dabei werden das wahrgenommene Kaufrisiko, die persönliche Bedeutung des Kaufes sowie das vorhandene Produktwissen als Einflussvariablen getestet. Darüber hinaus wird untersucht, welche Rolle das Datenschutzbewusstsein des Konsumenten in der Interaktion spielt und wie stark ein Zustand des 'Flows' (fließen) die Informationssuchtiefe beeinflussen. Die für Kameras beobachtete Onlinesuche nach Produktinformationen wird in einem zweiten Schritt mit der Onlinesuche nach Jacken verglichen. Eine wesentliche Erkenntnis der empirischen Arbeit ist, dass virtuelle Verkaufsberater bei der Suche nach unterschiedlichen Produkten nicht dieselbe Wichtigkeit haben. So wird deutlich, dass sich Konsumenten auf der Suche nach dem Erfahrungsgut Jacke relativ weniger auf die Empfehlung des Agenten verlassen als dies im Kaufprozess von Kameras der Fall ist. Hinzu kommen einige signifikante Anzeichen dafür, dass Konsumenten den Suchprozess stärker zu kontrollieren wünschen und weniger an Agenten delegieren, desto mehr Kaufrisiko bzw. Kaufunsicherheit sie empfinden. Schließlich zeigt sich analog zu älteren Studien, dass Konsumenten mit mehr Produktwissen weniger mit virtuellen Verkaufsberatern interagieren. Im letzten Kapitel der Dissertation geht es um eine potentiell maßgebliche Barriere für den Einsatz von virtuellen Verkaufsberatern: die Angst von Konsumenten ihre Privatsphäre einzubüßen und zum 'gläsernen Kunden' zu werden. Die empirischen Ergebnisse legen hier jedoch nahe, dass Datenschutzbedenken die Konsumenten nicht davon abhalten, sich online mitzuteilen. Ganz im Gegenteil wird deutlich, dass Konsumenten sogar bereit sind, sehr persönliche Informationen von sich preiszugeben, wenn das System eine entsprechende Gegenleistung bietet (wie beispielsweise eine persönliche Produktempfehlung). Die Ergebnisse suggerieren, dass es einen großen Gestaltungsspielraum für Unternehme gibt, über elektronische Dialogsysteme mit ihren Kunden zu kommunizieren. Würden Unternehmen das potentielle Spektrum an persönlichen Fragen nutzen, die im Rahmen eines Kaufprozesses sinnvoll sind, könnten sie wertvolle Einblicke in das Entscheidungsverhalten ihrer Kunden gewinnen. Hingegen sollte beachtet werden, dass eine mangelhafte Berücksichtigung des Datenschutzes gleichzeitig auch Unbehangen beim Nutzer auslöst, welches sich in signifikant kürzeren Interaktionszeiten wiederspiegelt. Es ist daher im Interesse von Unternehmen, für eine datenschutzfreundliche Interaktionsumgebung zu sorgen. / Based on an online experiment with 206 subjects the thesis investigates how consumers search for high-involvement products online and herein rely on the assistance of electronic advisor agents. In the context of a camera purchase traditional constructs relevant in offline information search (including perceived product risk, purchase involvement and product knowledge) are tested for their relevance in an online environment. In addition, new constructs impacting online search, namely privacy concerns and flow, are analyzed. Finally, information search behavior for cameras is compared with the one for jackets. One major finding is that agents do not play the same role in, and are not equally important for, online information search in different product categories. Thus, it appears, that the search process for the experience good 'jacket' involves relatively less reliance on an electronic agent than this is the case in the purchase process for cameras. Moreover, the separate analysis of manually controlled and agent-assisted search shows that, at a significant level, consumers prefer to manually control the search process the more risk they perceive. In line with older studies the data also suggest that the more product knowledge a consumer perceives the less he interacts with an agent for information search purposes. In the last chapter, the thesis focuses on a potentially major impediment for agent interaction, namely consumer privacy concerns. The empirical results show that, against expectations, privacy concerns to not seem to significantly impede consumer disclosure online. In contrast, evidence is produced that if systems offer appropriate returns in the form of personalized recommendations online users seem to be ready to reveal even highly personal information. The findings suggest that there is a lot of room for online marketers to communicate with their clients through dialogue-based electronic agents. If marketers used the spectrum of legitimate personal questions that are related to the product selection process more systematically, they could gain valuable insight into their customers' decision making process as well as on decisive product attributes. However, unfavorable privacy settings do seem to induce a feeling of discomfort among users which then leads to less interaction time. Marketers therefore have to provide for a comforting privacy environment in order to make their customers feel good about the interaction.

This study investigates, theoretically and empirically, the role of animacy in the development of gender systems. The theoretical background is a grammaticalisation approach to language change. Concerning gender, this presupposes that classifications begin as semantic distinctions in the realm of animacy with flexible, contextually based agreement between the gender-marking elements. This kind of gender is called contextual gender. In the course of time, these classifications will spread into other areas, they become desemanticized and the agreement relation grammaticalizes into one of government where the inherent gender of the head noun controls the gender of the agreeing elements, irrespective of contextual factors When this leads to a great number of violations of the principles of contextual agreement in the realm of animacy, a new cycle of semantic classification will begin, creating layers of classifications. For German and Swedish two different layers are discerned respectively. The empirical starting point of this project was the observation of two opposite developments in the area of female person reference in Germany and Sweden. As a consequence of feminist critique of language, mainly targeted at the use of socalled masculine generics, in Germany the use of female gender-specific nouns increased substantially, the major means being female derivation with –in, so-called motion. Although similar means for female derivation exist in Swedish, i.e. -inna and -ska, the number of derivations used is decreasing. In order to isolate socio-cultural and historical facts from language-internal mechanisms behind the diverging tendencies, a historical sketch of the development of equal rights, of language criticism and of the development of the female suffixes is drawn for the respective countries. It is obvious, that the German strategy to achieve gender-fair language use is established by making women visible by means of motion, while in Sweden the use of gender-neutral forms for a long period of time has been regarded as a sign of equality. This ‘neutral’ use of former masculine and male-specific forms has been made possible by the merging of the two nominal genders masculine and feminine into uter (Sw. utrum). A contrastive study of comparable German and Swedish newspaper texts shows that the lack of motion in Swedish is partly compensated by composition and attribution with gender-specific lexemes. Still, the 64% gender-specific noun phrases in Swedish cannot compare with the 95% in German. But the use of gender-specific forms for well over half of the person references calls into doubt the general opinion shared by most Swedes that Swedish has a gender-neutral person reference system. Linguistic asymmetry persists as long as gender-specification is restricted to one half of the gendered population, whatever the means for specification. The almost exclusive use of gender-specific forms in German is seen as indicative of a grammaticalisation process. Haspelmaths invisible hand explanation of grammaticalisation is used to show how the development of -in in German fulfils just about every requirement on a grammaticalisation process – language-external as well as -internal – while -inna and -ska neither are promoted sufficiently by the speech community nor does there exist a paradigm that could accommodate them. In contrast to Swedish, where the suffixes remain strictly derivational, it is demonstrated that -in is turning into an inflectional marker. The German gender sub-system for person reference is developing into a semantically based system with genderflexible person denominations. A study of the pronouns agreeing with non-personal-agents in a parallel corpus of EU-documents shows that other aspects than purely referential or formal ones impinge on the choice of agreement forms. Non-personal-agents in certain contexts expose both agency and intentionality, which turns them into suitable agreement partners for animate pronouns. In Swedish, all animate pronouns are sexed, leaving a “Leerstelle” for these inanimate but agentive and intentional referents. In German, this problem is covered by the polysemy of the personal pronouns. Non-personal-agents are shown to be one possiblesource for the spreading of a linguistic innovation from the realm of animacy into inanimate contexts via semantic and thematic roles that share important features with animates proper. The last study makes use of different types of German monolingual corpora in order to investigate the agreement between inanimate nouns with female inherent gender – from non-personal-agents and abstracts to concrete nouns – and agent nouns which can potentially expose agreement by female derivation. Although the results are rather heterogeneous, they allow the formulation of the hypothesis that agreement is more likely to occur with nouns for which a metaphorical bridge to stereotypical conceptions of femininity can be constructed and that key collocations with high frequency such as die Kirche als Trägerin or die DNA als Trägerin der Erbinformation contribute significantly to the spread of the agreement pattern.