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A common feature in the empirical literature of intra-industry trade is the analysis of trade between a given reference country and a set of partners. This article differs from previous studies by examining the bilateral trade among all trading partners within a set of partners. Using a panel data approach, we find that differences in factor endowments seem not to be important as a driving force behind vertical intra-industry trade for European countries over the chosen period. More important driving forces are production size, geographical proximity, average income per capita and income distribution overlap.

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In this article, we address to what extent the proverb "the sound makes the music" also applies to humanrobot interaction, and whether robots could profit from using speech characteristics similar to those used by charismatic speakers like Steve Jobs. In three empirical studies, we investigate the effects of using Steve Jobs' and Mark Zuckerberg's speech characteristics during the generation of robot speech on the robot's persuasiveness and its impressionistic evaluation. The three studies address different human-robot interaction situations, which range from online questionnaires to real-time interactions with a large service robot, yet all involve both behavioral measures and users' assessments. The results clearly show that robots can profit from using charismatic speech. 4:2 K. Fischer et al.or another. For this reason, speech melody is necessarily present in robot speech as much as in human speech.In robot speech, usually off-the-shelf speech synthesizers are used (e.g., Mary TTS, Festival, eSpeak, FreeTTS, Vocoder, HTS), which come with speech melodies that depend on the sentence structure, for instance, by placing stress on content words [cf. Taylor 2009;Dutoit 2013]. These speech synthesizers are not implemented with persuasiveness in mind, but target as many possible uses as possible: "commercially developed TTS system have emphasized coverage rather than linguistic sophistication, by concentrating their efforts on text analysis strategies" [cf. Dutoit 2013:148]. Thus, speech melody is not adapted to different purposes, and most systems do not even allow the manipulation of prosodic features, such as speech melody, duration, spectral distribution, formant dynamics, and so on. Some studies in HRI have therefore used human recorded speech [e.g., Nishio et al. 2012;Kanda et al. 2008], and several studies show that people prefer human speech over presynthesized speech [e.g., Nass and Brave 2005]. Nevertheless, in the long run, with robots becoming more flexible and situations of use becoming more varied and unpredictable, robots will have to synthesize their own speech and cannot rely on pre-recorded utterances alone.In this article, we present three studies that investigate the influence of speech melody and other prosodic features in robot speech both on users' impressionist evaluations of the respective robots and on the robots' persuasiveness. The results show that speech melody, and prosody in general, has a considerable effect on how robots are evaluated and how persuasive they may be; this finding proved to be robust in that it holds across HRI scenarios and robots. These results indicate that robot designers should pay careful attention to how robots say what they have to say if we want robots to function seamlessly in social interactions. PREVIOUS WORKPrevious work indicates that various characteristics of robot speech may play a role in humancomputer and human-robot interaction [cf. Nass and Brave 2005]. Especially whether the robot's voice is human or whether it is synthesized seems to make a cons...

In this paper we explore how social gaze in an assembly robot affects how naïve users interact with it. In a controlled experimental study, 30 participants instructed an industrial robot to fetch parts needed to assemble a wooden toolbox. Participants either interacted with a robot employing a simple gaze following the movements of its own arm, or with a robot that follows its own movements during tasks, but which also gazes at the participant between instructions. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses show that people in the social gaze condition are significantly more quick to engage the robot, smile significantly more often, and can better account for where the robot is looking. In addition, we find people in the social gaze condition to feel more responsible for the task performance. We conclude that social gaze in assembly scenarios fulfills floor management functions and provides an indicator for the robot's affordance, yet that it does not influence likability, mutual interest and suspected competence of the robot.

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