• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.99-118
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• 2019

Online financial counseling services are increasingly expanding with the rise of artificial intelligence-based chatbots. It is very important to examine the effects of emoticons noted as alternatives for communicating emotions in online communication between consumers and companies. In this paper, we examine how the use of emoticons affects the consumer's response and investigate the moderating roles of type of counseling agents (human vs. chatbot) and the consumer's subjective financial knowledge. The results show that the use of emoticon in the conversation brings a positive effect on the consumer's intention to use of online chat counseling service. When participants had relatively low subjective financial knowledge, they had higher intention to use online chat counseling services with emoticons only when the agent type was chatbot. When the type of counseling agent was human, this positive effect of the emoticon did not occur. On the other hand, when participants had relatively high subjective financial knowledge, they had higher intention to use online chat counseling service with emoticons only when the agent type was human. This study contributes to providing practical implications to build online chat counseling service using chatbot in the financial industry by studying users' intention depending on the type of agents and the level of their subjective knowledge.