Knowledge that Transforms

Ritu Agarwal (“ The Effects of Diversity in Global, Distributed Collectives: A Study of Open Source Project Success ”) is Professor and Dean's Chair of Information Systems at the R.H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, where she also directs the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems. She has published over 80 papers in journals such as JAMIA, Health Affairs, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, and elsewhere. Her current research is focused on the use and transformational impacts of IT in healthcare settings, how health IT changes clinical workflows, privacy concerns with digitized medical information, and the effects of IT on cost and healthcare quality. John Aloysius (“ Sequential Pricing of Multiple Products: Leveraging Revealed Preferences of Retail Customers Online and with Auto-ID Technologies ”) is an associate professor of supply chain management at the Walton College of Business. His Ph.D. is in Management Science and Operations Management from Temple University in 1996. His research interests are in emerging technologies and behavior in the retail supply chain. His publications have appeared in Production and Operations Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, European Journal of Operations Research, Decision Sciences, and other journals. Martin Bichler (“ Efficiency with Linear Prices? A Game-Theoretical and Computational Analysis of the Combinatorial Clock Auction ”) is a full professor at the Department of Informatics of the TU München, and a faculty member at the TUM School of Management. He has contributed to different areas of computer science, information systems, and operations research. In particular he is interested in the design of multi-object markets. Martin worked as a consulter in spectrum auctions and on auction design. Jesse Bockstedt (“ The Framing Effects of Multipart Pricing on Consumer Purchasing Behavior of Customized Information Good Bundles ”) is an assistant professor of MIS in the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in business administration (information systems) from the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. His research focuses on electronic commerce, online consumer behavior, behavioral economics, and the impacts technology evolution on consumers and markets. His work has been published in Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Journal of MIS, and other leading journals. Robert Bostrom (“ An Investigation of the Appropriation of Technology-Mediated Training Methods Incorporating Enactive and Collaborative Learning ”) is a Professor Emeritus at University of Georgia. He is also President of a training and consulting company focusing on facilitation and the effective integration of people and technology. Besides numerous publications in leading academic and practitioner journals, he has extensive consulting and training experience. His current research interests are focused on business process management systems, digital collaboration, technology-supported learning, and the effective design of organizations via integrating human and technological components. Ann-Frances Cameron (“ Multicommunicating: Juggling multiple conversations in the workplace ”) is an associate professor in information technology at HEC Montréal. She received her Ph.D. from Queen's School of Business at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Her research interests include the use and impact of new technologies for inter- and intraorganizational communication. Her work has appeared in Organization Science, Computers in Human Behavior, Journal of Small Business Management, and Journal of Information Technology Education. Damon E. Campbell (“ Breaking the Ice in B2C Relationships: Understanding Pre-Adoption E-Commerce Attraction ”) is the Kelley Gene Cook, Sr. Chair of Business Administration and an Assistant Professor of Information Systems in the Else School of Management at Millsaps College. He received his B.A. (2003) in Business Administration from Lewis-Clark State College and M.B.A. (2004) and Ph.D. (2008) degrees from Washington State University. His research interests include interface characteristics in human-computer interaction, e-commerce strategy, and online business-to-consumer relationships. His research has appeared in Decision Sciences, the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, and others. Dipanjan Chatterjee (“ Governance of Interorganizational Information Systems: A Resource Dependence Perspective ”) is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Business, Brock University. He received his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research interest is investigating the role of information technology in inter-organizational relationships. He has published his work in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Government Information Quarterly and Information Systems and E-business Management. His work was also presented at the Academy of Management annual conference and at the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. Sherae Daniel (“ The Effects of Diversity in Global, Distributed Collectives: A Study of Open Source Project Success ”) is an assistant professor at the Katz School of Business, University of Pittsburgh. She received a B.S. and M.S. in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her current research is focused on Internet mediated work processes. Her work appears in journals including Statistical Science and the Journal of the AIS. Cary Deck (“ Sequential Pricing of Multiple Products: Leveraging Revealed Preferences of Retail Customers Online and with Auto-ID Technologies ”) is a professor of economics in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas where he also directs the Behavioral Business Research Laboratory. Dr. Deck is an affiliate of the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University and is Co-Editor of the Southern Economic Journal. His research focuses on the impact of institutions on market outcomes and strategic behavior. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Arizona. Rajiv M. Dewan (“ Pricing of Wireless Services: Service Pricing vs. Traffic Pricing ”) is a professor of computers and information systems and senior associate dean for faculty and research at the Simon School of Business, University of Rochester. Professor Dewan has teaching and research interests in electronic commerce, organizational issues in management of information systems, the information technology industry, and financial information systems. He has won three best paper awards for research, all done in collaboration with his colleagues at the Simon School. His current research interests include marketing on the Internet, employment contracts in the software industry, the use of standards in managing information systems, and the use of electronic documents in business workflow automation. His papers have appeared in Information Systems Research, Management Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal on Computing, Decision Support Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Computers. Amy Farmer (“ Sequential Pricing of Multiple Products: Leveraging Revealed Preferences of Retail Customers Online and with Auto-ID Technologies ”) is a professor of economics and holder of the Martin chair in business in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas where she also directs the Global Community Development Program. She is an applied game theorist focusing on conflict resolution with research interests in law and economics and economics of the family. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Duke University. Marshall Freimer (“ Pricing of Wireless Services: Service Pricing vs. Traffic Pricing ”) is a professor of management science and of computers and information systems at the Simon School of Business, University of Rochester. Professor Freimer has teaching and research interests in applied probability and optimization. His work appears in management, engineering, economics, statistics and mathematics journals. His recent papers have appeared in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Marketing Science. He is the co-author with Leonard S. Simon of the book Analytical Marketing. He has held a Ford Foundation Faculty Fellowship and has won the Simon School Superior Teaching Award. Xianjun Geng (“ Contracting Information Security in the Presence of Double Moral Hazard ”) is an assistant professor in information systems at the Jindal School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas. He received his Ph.D. in Information Systems from the University of Texas at Austin. His recent research focuses on how Internet-enabled IT transforms consumer behavior and firm strategy. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in academic journals such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Marketing, and Marketing Science. Kim Huat Goh (“ The Framing Effects of Multipart Pricing on Consumer Purchasing Behavior of Customized Information Good Bundles ”) is an assistant professor in the Division of IT and Operations Management in Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University. He received his Ph.D. in business administration (information systems) from the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. His research areas include behavioral economics, consumer behavior in technology mediated environments, electronic markets and the value of IT. He has previously published in MIS Quarterly and

Sulin Ba (“ Promotional Marketing or Word-of-Mouth? Evidence from Online Restaurant Reviews ”) is a professor of information systems in the School of Business at the University of Connecticut. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Her current research interests include the effective provision of e-service, digital health communities, and pricing of virtual goods. She has published in Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Production and Operations Management, Decision Support Systems, and other academic journals. Xue Bai (“ On Risk Management with Information Flows in Business Processes ”) is an associate professor of management information systems in the School of Business at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. degree in management information systems from Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests include mathematical modeling for managing data quality and information security related risks in enterprise information systems. Another of her research interests is in the area of data mining and machine learning methods applied to business and healthcare domains. Izak Benbasat (“ A Contingency Approach to Investigating the Effects of User-System Interaction Modes of Online Decision Aids ”) (Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1974; Doctorat Honoris Causa, Université de Montréal, 2009) is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, CANADA Research Chair in Information Technology Management at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Canada. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Journal Management Information Systems and Information Systems Journal. He was editor-in-chief of Information Systems Research, editor of the Information Systems and Decision Support Systems Department of Management Science, and a senior editor of MIS Quarterly. He became a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) in 2002, received the LEO Award for Lifetime Exceptional Achievements in Information Systems from AIS in 2007, and was conferred the title of Distinguished Fellow by the INFORMS Information Systems Society in 2009. Martin Bichler (“ Combinatorial Auctions with Allocation Constraints: On Game-Theoretical and Computational Properties of Generic Pricing Rules ”) received his Ph.D. as well as his Habilitation from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. He was working as a research fellow at UC Berkeley, and as research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. Since 2003, he is a full professor at the Department of Informatics of the TU München, and a faculty member at the TUM School of Management. Gordon Burtch (“ An Empirical Examination of the Antecedents and Consequences of Contribution Patterns in Crowd-Funded Markets ”) is a Ph.D. candidate in management information systems and a University Fellow in the Fox School of Business at Temple University. His research focuses on the drivers and economic implications of individual behavior in electronic markets and online communities. His work has been supported by funding from a variety of sources, including the Department of Education's CIBER initiative and partnerships with numerous startups in the crowdfunding industry. He has previously held positions as a technology consultant, hardware design engineer and information systems auditor. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering and an MBA from McMaster University. Andrew Burton-Jones (“ From Use to Effective Use: A Representation Theory Perspective ”) is Professor of Business Information Systems at UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, and adjunct professor at the Sauder School of Business, UBC. He obtained his Ph.D. from Georgia State University. He conducts research on user requirements, IT use, and methodological topics. He has published in, and served on the editorial boards of JAIS, ISR, MISQ, and other outlets. Prior to his academic career, he was a senior consultant in a Big-4 consulting firm. Kuo-Chung Chang (“ A View from the Top: Integrated Information Delivery and Effective Information Use from the Senior Executive's Perspective ”) is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Management at Yuan Ze University, Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. His current research focuses on IS project management, information security, and knowledge management. His work has been published in journals such as Information and Management, Information and Software Technology, and Journal of Systems and Software. Young Bong Chang (“ An Empirical Analysis of Technical Efficiency: The Role of IT Intensity and Competition ”) is an assistant professor at Sungkyunkwan University. He received his Ph.D. in management from the University of California, Irvine. His research interests are in the economics of information systems focusing on the business value of IT and outsourcing of information systems. His research has been published in Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems and Information Technology and Management. Pei-yu Chen (“ The Impact and Implications of On-Demand Services on Market Structure ”) is an associate professor of management information systems in the Fox School of Business at Temple University. Prior to this position, she was on the faculty in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her Ph.D. (2002) in operations and information management and M.S. in applied economics (2000) from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her MBA (1998) and B.S. in information management (1996) from National Taiwan University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of technology, economics and marketing, focusing on issues relevant to technology innovation, strategy and pricing. Her work has been published in leading journals such as Information Systems Research, Management Science, MIS Quarterly and Operations Research. She currently serves on the editorial board of Management Science and Production and Operations Management. She also previously served on the editorial board of Information Systems Research. Ben C. F. Choi (“ Privacy Concerns and Privacy-Protective Behavior in Synchronous Online Social Interactions ”) is a lecturer in Information Systems at the Australian Business School, University of New South Wales, Australia. His research interests focus on information privacy, social media, virtual communities, and knowledge management. Min Ding (“ IT Implementation Contract Design: Analytical and Experimental Investigation of IT Value, Learning, and Contract Structure ”) is the Smeal Professor of Marketing and Innovation in the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University, and an Advisory Professor of Marketing at the School of Management, Fudan University. He has a Ph.D. in Marketing (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), a Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology (Ohio State University), and a B.S. in Genetics and Genetic Engineering (Fudan University). He is V.P. of membership for the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS). Yue Feng (“ Promotional Marketing or Word-of-Mouth? Evidence from Online Restaurant Reviews ”) is currently a Ph.D. candidate of information systems in the School of Business and Management at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include e-marketing, online social communities, and behavioral decision of information technology adoption. Her paper has been presented at the Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE), 2011. Anindya Ghose (“ An Empirical Examination of the Antecedents and Consequences of Contribution Patterns in Crowd-Funded Markets” and “How is the Mobile Internet Different? ”) is an associate professor of information, operations, and management sciences and the Robert L. & Dale Atkins Rosen Faculty Fellow at New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business. He is the co-Director of the Center for Business Analytics at NYU Stern. He is also a Daniel P. Paduano Fellow of Business Ethics at NYU Stern. His research analyzes the economic consequences of Internet and mobile technologies on industries and markets transformed by their shared infrastructure. He has been quoted numerous times in the BBC, New York Times, Financial Times, Forbes, NBC, Xinhua, Reuters, Washington Post, New York Daily, National Public Radio, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, China Daily, Knowledge@Wharton, and elsewhere. He is a senior editor at ISR and associate editor at Management Science. His research has been recognized with eight best paper awards or nominations and several dozen competitive grants from the NSF, corporates, and other institutions. Avi Goldfarb (“ How is the Mobile Internet Different? ”) is a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. His research examines brand value, boundedly rational decisions by managers, and the impact of information technology on marketing, universities, and the economy. Professor Goldfarb has published over 40 articles in a variety of outlets in economics, marketing, computing, statistics, and law, and serves in editorial roles at a number of journals. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University. Camille Grange (“ From Use to Effective Use: A Representation Theory Perspective ”) is a doctoral candidate at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. She received her M.Sc. degree in MIS from HEC Montréal where she worked on the usability of information systems. Her current research focuses on st

Topical locality on the Web is the notion that pages tend to link to other topically similar pages and that such similarity decays rapidly with link distance. This supports meaningful Web browsing and searching by information consumers. It also allows topical Web crawlers, programs that fetch pages by following hyperlinks, to harvest topical subsets of the Web for applications such as those in vertical search and business intelligence. We show that the Web exhibits another property that we call “status locality.” It is based on the notion that pages tend to link to other pages of similar status (importance) and that this status similarity also decays rapidly with link distance. Analogous to topical locality, status locality may also be exploited by Web crawlers. Collections built by such crawlers include pages that are both topically relevant and also important. This capability is crucial because of the large numbers of Web pages addressing even niche topics. The challenge in exploiting status locality while crawling is that page importance (or status) is typically recognized through global measures computed by processing link data from billion of pages. In contrast, topical Web crawlers depend on local information based on previously downloaded pages. We solve this problem by using methods developed previously that utilize local characteristics of pages to estimate their global status. This leads to the design of new crawlers, specifically of utility-biased crawlers guided by a Cobb-Douglas utility function. Our crawler experiments show that status and topicality of Web collections present a trade-off. An adaptive version of our utility-biased crawler dynamically modifies output elasticities of topicality and status to create Web collections that maintain high average topicality. This can be done while simultaneously achieving significantly higher average status as compared to several benchmarks including a state-of-the-art topical crawler.

This paper develops an innovative real options (RO) model for valuing multistage information technology (IT) projects that can be viewed as comprising meta stages. In RO literature, multistage investment programs have been treated as either interproject or intraproject programs, with intraproject programs being evaluated using n-fold Geske compound options and interproject programs valued using the so-called “subsidy-to-exercise price” logic. Our innovative RO model integrates the Geske compound option model with the subsidy-to-exercise price approach to value sequential investment programs that are neither purely interproject nor purely intraproject in nature but are composed of meta-stages. A meta-stage as a whole can be considered an interproject stage resulting in cash flows, but internally it consists of several intraproject stages that do not result in cash flows. We show that a key problem in IT, which is migrating to a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for integrating a firm's many disparate applications, systems, data, and business processes, is best viewed as an investment program comprising meta-stages. Examining SOA migration from an RO lens is particularly apt at this time not only because of the importance of SOA but also because doubts have surfaced about the value of SOA. We illustrate our RO model by applying it to the simulated case of a firm migrating to SOA. We also develop a software tool based on the Mathematica TM computational platform so that practitioners can easily apply our innovative options pricing model to determine the true value of SOA in their business contexts.

Information technology (IT) infrastructure outsourcing arrangements involve multiple services and processes that are interdependent. The interdependencies pose significant challenges in designing appropriate incentives to influence a provider's effort-allocation decisions. By integrating process modeling fundamentals with multitask agency theory, we enumerate the base set of possible interrelationships among different IT service processes and derive corresponding optimal incentives. Our results demonstrate the impacts of risk profile, random noise, value-cost ratio, and process structure on optimal incentive rates. We find that the current practice of treating IT services as essentially independent is optimal only in limited settings where both the service provider and customer are risk neutral. Interestingly, incongruent performance measures require optimal incentive rates to respond in complex ways to the strength of coupling between services and the complementarity and substitutability of services. We also analyze more complex process scenarios using different combinations of the base set. The results demonstrate that, while the findings from the base set largely hold, the value-cost ratio of the services and the performance measure congruity can pose unique challenges in determining incentive rates.

Open source software is becoming increasingly prominent, and the economic structure of open-source development is changing. In recent years, firms motivated by revenues from software services markets have become the primary contributors to open-source development. In this paper we study the role of services in open source software development and explore the choice between open source and proprietary software. Specifically, our economic model jointly analyzes the investment and pricing decisions of the originators of software and of subsequent open-source contributors. We find that if a contributor is efficient in software development, the originator should adopt an open-source strategy, allowing the contributor to offer higher total quality and capture the higher end of the market while the originator focuses on providing software services to lower end consumers. Conversely, if the contributor is not efficient in development, the originator should adopt a proprietary software development strategy, gaining revenue from software sales and squeezing the contributor out of the services market. In certain cases an increase in originator development efficiency can result in increased contributor profits. Finally, we find that, somewhat counterintuitively, an increase in contributor development efficiency can reduce overall social welfare.

Personalization technologies today enable retailers to tailor online purchase interactions to the individual preferences and needs of customers. With personalization being increasingly perceived as a source of competitive advantage, there is a growing trend toward pursuing technology-enabled personalization strategies in online retailing. However, the choice of a retailer whether or not to select into technology-enabled personalization and its implications for customer loyalty are at best ambiguous. This paper is an attempt to resolve this apparent ambiguity. Specifically, the paper conceptualizes retailer selection into technology-enabled personalization strategies relevant to two steps of an online purchase, namely, transaction personalization strategy and decision personalization strategy, based on the operating characteristics of a retailer. The implications of the retailers' self-selection into technology-enabled personalization strategies for customer loyalty are then empirically investigated with data collected from 422 retailers. Further, based on a counterfactual analysis, the paper reveals the implications of making a normatively incorrect decision with respect to personalization strategy. Contrary to popular belief, the results of this study indicate that personalization may not be uniformly beneficial in terms of customer loyalty to all retailers. Although a majority of retailers pursue transaction personalization and realize benefits by way of improved customer loyalty, we find that the choice of a retailer to pursue decision personalization is self-selected and dependent on idiosyncratic characteristics related to its operating context. Retailers that have relatively large-scale operations, provide greater variety and realize higher customer satisfaction with product selection, and that do not necessarily compete on price (i.e., realize lower customer satisfaction with prices relative to competing retailers) are more likely to pursue the decision personalization strategy. Although some retailers pursue decision personalization because they clearly stand to benefit from doing so, other retailers are better off not following suit. Theoretical contributions of the study, managerial implications of the study findings, limitations, and directions for future research are identified.