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Millions of people experience mental health issues each year, increasing the necessity for health-related services. One emerging technology with the potential to help address the resulting shortage in health care providers and other barriers to treatment access are conversational agents (CAs). CAs are software-based systems designed to interact with humans through natural language. However, CAs do not live up to their full potential yet because they are unable to capture dynamic human behavior to an adequate extent to provide responses tailored to users' personalities. To address this problem, we conducted a design science research (DSR) project to design personality-adaptive conversational agents (PACAs). Following an iterative and multi-step approach, we derive and formulate six design principles for PACAs for the domain of mental health care. The results of our evaluation with psychologists and psychiatrists suggest that PACAs can be a promising source of mental health support. With our design principles, we contribute to the body of design knowledge for CAs and provide guidance for practitioners who intend to design PACAs. Instantiating the principles may improve interaction with users who seek support for mental health issues., Competing Interests: Conflict of InterestThe authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. All co-authors have seen and agree with the contents of the manuscript, and there is no financial interest to report., (© The Author(s) 2022.)

Engagement platforms (EPs) are an essential technology to enable co-creation and service innovation. Therefore, the design and governance of these platforms are receiving increasing attention in research. In this study, we aim to identify which activities and mechanisms foster engagement and which governance mechanisms are implemented to avoid harm on EPs. To this end, we conducted expert interviews with founders, CEOs, and managers of 14 personal and household-related service platform companies from the DACH region (Germany(D), Austria(A), Switzerland(CH)), to gain insights into their activities and mechanisms for creating and maintaining successful EPs. We found eight mechanisms, e.g., moderation of content, limitations of entry and certification, employed by personal EPs (PEPs) as self-regulatory mechanisms to avoid misconduct and negative experiences of actors. The identified governance mechanisms may guide the design and governing of PEPs by providing tangible examples to foster actor engagement while considering externalities on a societal and individual level., (© The Author(s) 2022, corrected publication 2022.)