Knowledge that Transforms

We study the potential for digital, online information and electronic voting to improve shareholder surplus by facilitating a new governance structure, owner-governance, which shifts control of the takeover decision from the board to shareholders. We compare analytical models of owner-governance to the current practice of delegated-governance in the context of increasing availability of online information, which increases public informedness. Our analysis shows that shareholders of the target firm and the acquirer both prefer owner-governance to delegated-governance when informedness is sufficiently high. Interestingly, we find a region where owner-governance offers a higher probability of takeover but delegated-governance offers higher shareholder surplus. Under delegated-governance, the board endogenously sets an entrenchment level that is always greater than the entrenchment level preferred by the shareholders and increasing informedness reduces the probability of a takeover. Our results suggest that owner-governance should be considered because of increasing informedness.

In this article, an evolutionary argument to explain how people comprehend graphs is put forth. A theory of evolutionary fit, which argues for the correspondence between information presentation and evolutionarily adaptive brain structures, is proposed. This is complementary to cognitive fit, which argues for a correspondence between task and information presentation. In two fMRI experiments, we test this theory by comparing brain activation during a graphic comprehension task using two different graph types: bubble graphs and three-dimensional surface graphs. In accordance with our hypotheses, we find that comprehension of three-dimensional surface graphs results in greater activation of the ventral stream and greater accuracy in graphical comprehension than bubble graphs. We argue that this is because the human visual system is evolutionarily adapted to the comprehension of three-dimensional surfaces. The implication is that choosing graphical representations that match what the brain is evolutionarily specialized to process can enhance graphic comprehension.

Prior usability assessment research has paid little attention to how product and feature ratings are influenced by the evaluation context. However, the evaluability hypothesis, which guides this research, suggests that the evaluation context is a vital factor in shaping user’s assessments and perceptions about technology features. pecifically, the evaluability hypothesis proposes that technology feature perceptions, and ultimately technology choices, will change when evaluating a single technology in isolation versus when simultaneously comparing more than one. To demonstrate the evaluability hypothesis effect in the context of consumer technology product evaluations, two experiments were conducted. Both studies support the evaluability hypothesis effect, showing that when two IT products are compared, hard-to-evaluate but easy-to-compare features are perceived to be more important and therefore have a larger influence on product preferences. Alternatively, when evaluating a single product in isolation, easy-to-evaluate features are perceived to be more important and therefore have a larger influence on product preferences. Consequently, different product preferences emerge (i.e., preference reversals) in different evaluation contexts. The results demonstrate that this theoretical lens is robust to the technology evaluation context, providing important theoretical and practical insights for technology design, usability assessments, and, ultimately, product acceptance.

The quality of an organization’s decisions depends on the quality of the data in its information systems. When technology records employees’ work automatically, information quality is ensured by algorithms that produce electronic representations of work. What happens when employees report their own work? We show that the quality of this self-reported information depends on how managers direct their employees to report their work in their organization’s information systems. We refer to constructing this representation as transfiguration work. We draw on a 15-month ethnography to specify the process of transfiguration work along with the characteristics of the system of transfiguration that supports it. Our specification of transfiguration work supplements the model of representation implicit in research on management information systems. We show how managers can take over information technology in enforcing the practices that employees follow to report their work. By doing so, we theorize a broader role for agency in the representation of work. We conclude that organizations can improve the quality of data in their information systems by shaping how managers enforce transfiguration work, rather than by changing the information systems where employees report their work.

The MISQ Trifecta Vision focuses on (1) impact of published work; (2) range of published work (with respect to problems investigated, theories and methods employed, and stakeholders influenced); and (3) speed of editorial processes.The MISQ Research Curations initiative was launched in January 2016 as an initiative to enhance impact of work published in MISQ by serving as a go-to source on topics of significant interest to the IS field

The first few pages of an article can make it or break it.They can make editors and reviewers lean into an article with intrigue and expectation of high payoff or lean out with boredom or confusion.Yet, many authors pay insufficient attention to these parts of