Eligibility
Research Teams (RTs) may consist of one or two members. To participate in the project, each RT must meet the following eligibility criteria:
- Each RT may consist of no more than two members.
- At least one team member must hold a PhD in Economics, Psychology, Marketing, Information Systems, or a related field.
- At least one team member must have conducted an experimental study that is published, accepted for publication, or documented as a working paper.
- Each researcher may participate in only one RT.
Borderline cases will be evaluated by the project coordinators (PCs) and decided by majority vote.
Design Requirements
RT is required to submit one experimental design, consisting of two system-level prompts to be used as input for a large language model operating in a conversational online shopping environment:
- Baseline system prompt
A prompt that provides shopping assistance without explicitly encouraging environmentally sustainable purchasing decisions. - Treatment system prompt
A prompt that extends the baseline system prompt and is intended to encourage the purchase of environmentally sustainable clothing products.
Together, the baseline and treatment system prompts constitute one complete experimental design.
RTs are required to ground their prompt design in a clear theoretical rationale and to briefly describe the underlying theory, including relevant references. Differences between the treatment and baseline prompts should be limited to features that are essential to the proposed intervention, in order to ensure interpretability and comparability across designs.
All submitted prompts will be implemented centrally by the PCs within a shared conversational shopping platform. This centralized implementation ensures that all designs operate in an identical task environment.
Design Constraints
All RT designs must adhere to the following constraints:
- No deception of participants
- No physical or psychological harm to participants
- Text-only prompts with a maximum length of 200 words for the baseline system prompt and 200 words for the treatment system prompt
- All prompts must be written in English
- Treatment and control prompts must be clearly labeled
- Language must be inclusive and avoid culturally biased assumptions
- Prompts must not request personal information beyond what is already collected by the platform
- All designs must comply with the terms and conditions of the online research platform
RTs must submit their designs using the research proposal submission template provided after registration. RTs will not have access to other teams’ submissions, and no feedback or iteration across RTs will occur after submission.
The PCs will conduct a procedural pre-screening of all submitted RT proposals prior to experimental implementation to ensure compliance with the constraints listed above. This pre-screening does not involve any evaluation of the substantive content or the expected effectiveness of the proposed designs.
Preregistration & Transparency
The study will be preregistered to ensure transparency, reproducibility, and credibility. All analyses will follow the preregistered protocol, and anonymized data may be shared with the academic community.