Despite the benefits of using smart speakers, serious privacy concerns have been raised, particularly due to their constantly listening microphones. Given the mixture of the advantages and risks deciding whether to use them is not an easy matter, casting a doubt about sustainable growth and development of smart speakers. Using a sample of 559 users in South Korea and the U.S., we empirically investigated the dilemma of users seeking to adopt smart speakers. The results revealed users’ perceived usefulness and enjoyment positively influenced the intention to adopt smart speakers. No direct effect of perceived ease of use was found but this effect was completely mediated by perceived usefulness and enjoyment. Perceived enjoyment was found to be twice as strong as perceived usefulness in determining the usage intention, confirming the hedonic aspect of smart speakers. Conversely, perceived privacy risks were shown to be a significant negative factor. This negative impact was significantly stronger in the U.S. than in South Korea. We could infer that the more mature the stage of acceptance of smart speakers, the greater the sensitivity of users to privacy risks. Lastly, in the South Korean sample, we found that the perceived usefulness could reduce the negative impact of perceived risks on the intention. to adopt smart speakers.

This study analyzes the effect of overnight returns on subsequent stock market returns and investigates whether they do capture investor sentiment in the Korean stock market. Recent study showed that overnight returns are similar to existing sentiment measures, and, thus, are suitable for measuring firm-specific investor sentiment in the U.S. market. Similarly, we found that, for firms in the Korean market, high overnight returns are followed by higher stock returns in the short term (i.e., two or three trading days) but lower stock returns in the long term. However, these effects do not differ for different types of firms (i.e., hard-to-value firms), whereas classical firm-specific sentiment indicators capture these differences. Overall, we found that overnight returns do not truly measure firm-specific investor sentiment in the Korean stock market even though they are partially related to investor sentiment.

No abstract