Innovative Accounting Interviewing: A Comparison of Real and Virtual Accounting Interviewers
研究通过三个实验比较了虚拟访谈代理（ECA）与人类访谈者在会计访谈中的表现，发现增强ECA与受访者面部和声音相似性可使其在披露质量前因上表现不逊于甚至优于人类，且员工向ECA披露违反内部控制行为的可能性比向人类高21%至32%。
ABSTRACT Recent technological advances make it possible to create automated virtual interviewers, called embodied conversational agents (ECAs). We study how an ECA compares to a human interviewer in three experiments. In experiment 1, we show that two theoretically motivated factors—making the ECA facially and vocally similar to the interviewee—result in the ECA performing similarly to or better than human interviewers for six antecedents of disclosure quality. In two additional experiments, we show that employees are, on average, 21 to 32 percent more likely to disclose violating internal controls to an ECA than to a human, even if the human interviewer has significant interviewing experience. These findings contribute to the ECA design literature by showing that similarity-enhancing features of ECAs increase the antecedents of disclosure. The findings also contribute to the accounting literature by demonstrating that ECA technology can increase the scope of interviewing in accounting without reducing interview quality.