  Artificial intelligence based chatbots have brought unprecedented business
potential. This study aims to explore consumers trust and response to a
text-based chatbot in ecommerce, involving the moderating effects of task
complexity and chatbot identity disclosure. A survey method with 299 useable
responses was conducted in this research. This study adopted the ordinary least
squares regression to test the hypotheses. First, the consumers perception of
both the empathy and friendliness of the chatbot positively impacts their trust
in it. Second, task complexity negatively moderates the relationship between
friendliness and consumers trust. Third, disclosure of the text based chatbot
negatively moderates the relationship between empathy and consumers trust,
while it positively moderates the relationship between friendliness and
consumers trust. Fourth, consumers trust in the chatbot increases their
reliance on the chatbot and decreases their resistance to the chatbot in future
interactions. Adopting the stimulus organism response framework, this study
provides important insights on consumers perception and response to the
text-based chatbot. The findings of this research also make suggestions that
can increase consumers positive responses to text based chatbots. Extant
studies have investigated the effects of automated bots attributes on consumers
perceptions. However, the boundary conditions of these effects are largely
ignored. This research is one of the first attempts to provide a deep
understanding of consumers responses to a chatbot.
