Dr Rehan Husain’s research lies at the intersection of consumer behaviour, emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, digital marketing, luxury consumption, hospitality, and tourism. His work examines how consumers interpret and respond to virtual influencers, service robots, AI-enabled decision-making, smart retail technologies, anthropomorphic digital agents, and technology-mediated brand experiences. Across these areas, he is particularly interested in themes such as trust, authenticity, psychological ownership, social presence, consumer control, skepticism, social comparison, digital well-being, and behavioral intentions.
A recurring focus of his research is understanding how the design and deployment of emerging technologies shape consumer perceptions, relationships, and decision-making. His work also considers how these effects vary across cultural contexts, levels of technological realism, service environments, and consumer characteristics. Through this research, he seeks to generate insights that are theoretically rigorous, managerially relevant, and responsive to the ethical and psychological implications of technology-enabled marketing.
Methodologically, Dr Husain adopts a multi-method approach. His experience includes experimental research, cross-cultural studies, survey design, qualitative interviews, netnography, meta-analysis, and bibliometric analysis. His quantitative expertise encompasses structural equation modeling, partial least squares structural equation modeling, regression-based mediation and moderation analyses, fsQCA, necessary-condition analysis, and related advanced analytical techniques. He uses these methods to examine complex consumer and marketing phenomena from complementary perspectives and to produce robust, evidence-based findings.
