Despite the rapid growth of voice-enabled devices in the consumer-technology landscape, the actual user experience has been mixed. Limited conversational ability leads to enhanced user frustrations and consumer perceptions that voice assistants are mechanical and cold. The current work provides a new lens to study consumer voice-technology interactions, illuminating the largely unexplored role of how initiation modalities shape the user experience. We use a novel methodological approach to study consumer-voice technology interactions that leverages recent advances in voice analytics. We demonstrate that although short, syntactically reduced commands are the dominant way of interacting with digital voice assistants, the use of longer, syntactically enhanced requests promote a more natural interaction experience with the device. Our approach demonstrates that the degree of naturalness consumers experience as a function of the initiation modality is detectable by objective changes in their speech patterns. These patterns reveal that the reduced naturalness when using commands (vs. requests) is reflected by a more staccato-like speech pattern with increased vocal breaks, loudness, and vocal entropy. We find that the more positive interaction experiences produced by requests elicit more positive task evaluations with important downstream consequences including more positive word-of-mouth, more positive device ratings, and the envisioning of a broader range of tasks with the device in the future. The current work represents a critical early step in illuminating how conversational design choices of voice-enabled devices impact consumers’ experiences with emerging voice technologies in the marketplace.

Our study estimates the effects of environmental health risks on housing values using repeated property sales in a narrow time window when plants first report releasing car- cinogenic toxins and in narrow geographical areas surrounding the plants. More expensive properties experience a decline in value of around 15%, while less expensive ones benefit from an increase in value. Additionally, the number of employees in the same toxic plants increases by two percentage points after the environmental incident. Our results suggest that the willingness of households to pay to avoid such plants is offset by an increase in industrial activity with greater benefits for those who purchase lower-priced houses in the area.

The change in the cost of capital that results from a divestiture strategy can be closely approximated as a simple linear function of three parameters: (1) the fraction of socially conscious capital, (2) the fraction of targeted firms in the economy and (3) the return correlation between the targeted firms and the rest of the stock market. When calibrated to current data, we demonstrate that the impact on the cost of capital is too small to meaningfully affect real investment decisions. We empirically corroborate these small estimates by studying firm changes in ESG status and are unable to detect an impact of ESG divestiture strategies on the price or cost of capital of treated firms. Our results suggest that to have impact, instead of divesting, socially conscious investors should invest and exercise their rights of control to change corporate policy.