Abstract: AI recommendation systems face challenges such as the cold-start problem and privacy concerns. Can these be addressed through promotional strategies? As a tool for demonstrating corporate benevolence, sales promotion can enhance the perceived authenticity of price reductions and induce an emotional “hot state” in consumers via conditional designs. Drawing upon nudge theory and the research paradigm on conditional clauses in promotion decision-making, this study systematically investigates the nudging effects on instantaneous decision-making, including the role of the completeness of promotional conditional clauses in directing attention to recommendation texts, the impact of self-relevant promotional text and semantic comprehension on reinforcing preferences, the function of key promotional language in eliciting emotional responses and guiding intentions, as well as the contribution of contextual adaptation path and auxiliary persuasion strategy to multimodal linguistic cues. By synthesizing these findings, this study elucidates the linguistic mechanisms of promotional texts in mitigating privacy concerns and enhancing recommendation effectiveness, thereby providing theoretical guidance for formulating structured knowledge of promotional text nudging integrated with “User-Product-Context”, ultimately facilitating the optimization of AI recommendation systems.

Key words: AI recommendation, promotional text, nudge theory, language perception, instantaneous decision-making