Paper Title
Designing Social Chatbots - Should Chatbots be Proactive?

Abstract
The study examines the social aspects of Human-Chatbot conversation. In particular, it draws from the Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) to investigate the impacts of the prompt strategy. A randomized online experiment in a real business setting is designed to test the hypotheses. A chatbot is employed to assist the customers and also social media fans of a popular beer brand from China in a product customization task. Results reveal that the endowment of a social identity to a chatbot leads to a significant difference in how proactivity influences consumer decision making. Overall, the study aims to contribute to the information system literature on Human-AI interaction by disentangle the impacts of the social characteristics of the chatbot design—i.e., social identification and proactivity—on consumer decision making. Keywords - Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, the Prompt Strategy, Digital Experimentation, social identification