Sustainable Digital Entrepreneurship and Personalized Advertising in the Age of AI: A Bibliometric Analysis of Theoretical Frameworks, Consumer Behaviour Models, and SME Innovation Pathways in Asia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66635/9qgqzq39Keywords:
AI-personalized advertising, bibliometric analysis, technology acceptance, sustainable digital entrepreneurship, Asian SMEs, digital entrepreneurship, ethical AI, responsible innovation, sustainable marketing, entrepreneurial orientation, green innovation, SME digitalizationAbstract
The topic of artificial intelligence (AI) and personalized advertising has been gaining increasing academic interest, but no bibliometric mapping of this area has been conducted. This paper presents a retrospective bibliometric review of the literature on AI-based personalized advertising and its effects on consumer behavior, with references to the literature published in the Scopus database in 2015–2025. VOSviewer, R Studio (Biblioshiny package), and Microsoft Excel were used to analyze the 90 documents in order to assess the trends in publications, citation patterns, co-authorship networks, co-occurring keywords, and changes in the themes in the documents. Results suggest an exponential increase in growth, with more than 72% of the corpus being published in 2022–2025. The major contributors are the United States, India and China, with journals like the Journal of Business Research, Psychology and Marketing and the International Journal of Information Management being the main intellectual resources. The co-occurrence of keywords and bibliographic coupling are used to determine six thematic clusters: (1) Technology Acceptance and Adoption Models, (2) Persuasion and Information Processing Theories, (3) Stimulus–Organism–Response Frameworks, (4) Privacy and Ethical Decision-Making Theories, (5) Trust, Value, and Relationship Models, and (6) Emerging Interdisciplinary Approaches. The study also outlines research gaps that are critical, such as the lack of cross-cultural research, the lack of integration of explainable AI (XAI) in the models of consumer behavior, and the lack of longitudinal research that follows the changing attitudes of consumers. It suggests a research agenda in the future, whereby interdisciplinary frameworks are advocated to bridge the gap between computational advertising, behavioral economics, and regulatory science. In this context, Asia's fast-growing digital economy, the study also explores the role of AI-personalized advertising as a strategic catalyst for sustainable digital entrepreneurship, responsible innovation, and growth by SMEs. The literature has failed to sufficiently examine how SMEs and early-stage ventures in Asian markets can use ethical AI advertising to foster trust among consumers, gain differentiation, and pursue inclusive business development as evident from the corpus. This study clearly contributes to the field of AI advertising scholarship and links the results to marketing practices aligned with CSR and SME digitalisation pathways and responsible innovation frameworks. The findings of this study span the landscape of Asian entrepreneurs and SME managers, policymakers, and responsible marketers aiming to leverage AI-powered advertising while maintaining sustainability, data governance, and ethical innovation.
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