The design and implementation of online auctions has given rise to a unique set of bidding strategies that has stimulated a growing body of research. We make use of a theoretically grounded, well-u...
Opportunism, or self-interest seeking with guile, is often witnessed in human behavior, and it bedevils human interactions and relationships. Organizations expend considerable effort to reduce oppo...
This paper identifies and analyzes firm-level characteristics that facilitate onshore and offshore business process outsourcing BPO. We use organizational learning and capabilities to develop a con...
Organizational use of information and communications technologies ICT is increasingly resulting in negative cognitions in individuals, such as information overload and interruptions. Recent literat...
Many countries limit the influence of foreign entertainment products, such as music, film, and television programs, to protect their domestic cultural industry. Commonly observed policy tools include quotas, tariffs, and subsidies. However, advances in digital technology enable consumers to access digital versions of foreign entertainment programs via the Internet, a leakage channel that bypasses government protection methods. This calls for a reexamination of the effectiveness of these traditional tools. We build a unified analytical framework to study the impact of digital technology on cultural protection policies. We find that in the presence of Internet leakage, imposing a quota is the least effective protection policy to maximize the total domestic social welfare, but using either a tariff or subsidy policy is optimal, depending on the quality difference between domestic and foreign entertainment programs via the traditional channel and the Internet. Using quotas remains the least effective policy when we extend the analyses to consider the presence of piracy. In addition to the quality difference between foreign and domestic entertainment, the proportion of unethical consumers and the cost of piracy determine whether using tariffs or subsidies is the optimal policy.
Just as scientists in other disciplines use experience and a small set of frequently occurring problems to structure unfamiliar situations, information strategy and economics provides its own patterns to guide and structure the use of experience in managerial settings. These patterns emerged through case studies, theoretical derivations, and empirical analyses of company, industry, and national data sets. The six most frequently observed patterns identified here are (1) newly vulnerable markets experience opportunistic pickoff; (2) transparency of product attributes increases informedness, enabling resonance marketing and increasing the benefits from offering truly differentiated products and services; (3) changes in transaction costs have changed the boundary of the firm; (4) unique resources endowments can confer or sustain competitive advantage; (5) the geometry of distribution determines power and affects profitability; and (6) network-based advantages can form the basis of platformenvelopment strategies. Finally, prospects for the future of information, strategy, and economics over the coming two decades are reviewed.
Application-based pricing is common in telecommunications. Wireless carriers charge consumers more per byte of traffic for text messages than they do for wireless surfing or voice calls. Such pricing is possible because carriers and handset manufacturers have the ability to tag and meter each application. While tagging and metering are possible in the case of closed platforms such as iPhone, they are not in the case of open platforms such as Android. Android is open source with open application programming interfaces, and anyone can develop applications for it. Because the carriers have little control over applications, Android is inherently disruptive of differential pricing across applications. Users and neutrality advocates support Android, believing that it can increase consumer surplus by disrupting differential pricing. However, we show that the equilibrium under differential pricing is different from the equilibrium under open platforms, and it is particularly so with regard to the sets of consumers served and the quantities consumed. With open platforms, certain consumers are either not served or they are served a quantity that is less than what they would be served under differential pricing. Consequently, the consumer surplus and the social surplus are often lower with open platforms. Similarly, firms are expected to prefer differential pricing. We show that this expectation is also not true under certain circumstances in which open platforms and neutral pricing work like a quasi-bundle.
Online intermediaries have recently started offering database services to donors and certification services to nonprofit organizations through the Internet. We conceptualize a donor-to-nonprofit (D2N) marketplace as an online intermediary that offers these two services and examine its effect on fund-raising strategies of nonprofit organizations using an analytical model based on spatial competition under incomplete information with donor search. We characterize the signaling equilibria where certification of quality conveys information about organizational effectiveness in generating socially valuable services. Interestingly, the emergence of the D2N marketplace may lead to a drop in total net fund-raising revenues in the market, despite the fact that the intermediary's database service eliminates search costs for some donors. We also explain why such a marketplace may deliberately lower the accuracy of its certification process. Keywords: fund-raisingnonprofit organizationsonline marketplacesonline searchquality certificationseal of approvalsignaling