This paper extends the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to study acceptance and use of technology in a consumer context. Our proposed UTAUT2 incorporates three constructs into UTAUT: hedonic motivation, price value, and habit. Individual differences—namely, age, gender, and experience—are hypothesized to moderate the effects of these constructs on behavioral intention and technology use. Results from a two-stage online survey, with technology use data collected four months after the first survey, of 1,512 mobile Internet consumers supported our model. Compared to UTAUT, the extensions proposed in UTAUT2 produced a substantial improvement in the variance explained in behavioral intention (56 percent to 74 percent) and technology use (40 percent to 52 percent). The theoretical and managerial implications of these results are discussed.
Electronic commerce has grown rapidly in recent years. However, surveys of online customers continue to indicate that many remain unsatisfied with their online purchase experiences. Clearly, more research is needed to better understand what affects customers’ evaluations of their online experiences. Through a large dataset gathered from two online websites, this study investigates the importance of product uncertainty and retailer visibility in customers’ online purchase decisions, as well as the mitigating effects of retailer characteristics. We find that high product uncertainty and low retailer visibility have a negative impact on customer satisfaction. However, a retailer’s service quality, website design, and pricing play important roles in mitigating the negative impact of high product uncertainty and low retailer visibility. Specifically, service quality can mitigate the negative impacts of low retailer visibility and high product uncertainty in online markets. Website design, on the other hand, helps to reduce the impact of product uncertainty when experience goods are involved.
It has been argued that platform technology owners cocreate business value with other firms in their platform ecosystems by encouraging complementary invention and exploiting indirect network effects. In this study, we examine whether participation in an ecosystem partnership improves the business performance of small independent software vendors (ISVs) in the enterprise software industry and how appropriability mechanisms influence the benefits of partnership. By analyzing the partnering activities and performance indicators of a sample of 1,210 small ISVs over the period 1996–2004, we find that joining a major platform owner’s platform ecosystem is associated with an increase in sales and a greater likelihood of issuing an initial public offering (IPO). In addition, we show that these impacts are greater when ISVs have greater intellectual property rights or stronger downstream capabilities. This research highlights the value of interoperability between software products, and stresses that value cocreation and appropriation are not mutually exclusive strategies in inter-firm collaboration.
Open source software (OSS) is a social and economic phenomenon that raises fundamental questions about the motivations of contributors to information systems development. Some developers are unpaid volunteers who seek to solve their own technical problems, while others create OSS as part of their employment contract. For the past 10 years, a substantial amount of academic work has theorized about and empirically examined developer motivations. We review this work and suggest considering motivation in terms of the values of the social practice in which developers participate. Based on the social philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, we construct a theoretical framework that expands our assumptions about individual motivation to include the idea of a long-term, value-informed quest beyond short-term rewards. This motivation–practice framework depicts how the social practice and its supporting institutions mediate between individual motivation and outcome. The framework contains three theoretical conjectures that seek to explain how collectively elaborated standards of excellence prompt developers to produce high-quality software, change institutions, and sustain OSS development. From the framework, we derive six concrete propositions and suggest a new research agenda on motivation in OSS.
Business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) has emerged as an important area of study for both practitioners and researchers, reflecting the magnitude and impact of data-related problems to be solved in contemporary business organizations. This introduction to the MIS Quarterly Special Issue on Business Intelligence Research first provides a framework that identifies the evolution, applications, and emerging research areas of BI&A. BI&A 1.0, BI&A 2.0, and BI&A 3.0 are defined and described in terms of their key characteristics and capabilities. Current research in BI&A is analyzed and challenges and opportunities associated with BI&A research and education are identified. We also report a bibliometric study of critical BI&A publications, researchers, and research topics based on more than a decade of related academic and industry publications. Finally, the six articles that comprise this special issue are introduced and characterized in terms of the proposed BI&A research framework.
There is a pervasive belief in the MIS research community that PLS has advantages over other techniques when analyzing small sample sizes or data with non-normal distributions. Based on these beliefs, major MIS journals have published studies using PLS with sample sizes that would be deemed unacceptably small if used with other statistical techniques. We used Monte Carlo simulation more extensively than previous research to evaluate PLS, multiple regression, and LISREL in terms of accuracy and statistical power under varying conditions of sample size, normality of the data, number of indicators per construct, reliability of the indicators, and complexity of the research model. We found that PLS performed as effectively as the other techniques in detecting actual paths, and not falsely detecting non-existent paths. However, because PLS (like regression) apparently does not compensate for measurement error, PLS and regression were consistently less accurate than LISREL. When used with small sample sizes, PLS, like the other techniques, suffers from increased standard deviations, decreased statistical power,and reduced accuracy. All three techniques were remarkably robust against moderate departures from normality, and equally so. In total, we found that the similarities in results across the three techniques were much stronger than the differences.
Do information technology investments improve firm profitability? If so, is this effect because such investments help improve sales, or is it because they help reduce overall operating expenses? How does the effect of IT on profitability compare with that of advertising and of research and development? These are important questions because investments in IT constitute a large part of firms’ discretionary expenditures, and managers need to understand the likely impacts and mechanisms to justify and realize value from their IT and related resource allocation processes. The empirical evidence in this paper, derived using archival data from 1998 to 2003 for more than 400 global firms, suggests that IT has a positive impact on profitability. Importantly, the effect of IT investments on sales and profitability is higher than that of other discretionary investments, such as advertising and R&D. A significant portion of the impact of IT on firm profitability is accounted for by IT-enabled revenue growth, but there is no evidence for the effect of IT on profitability through operating cost reduction. Taken together, these findings suggest that firms have had greater success in achieving higher profitability through IT-enabled revenue growth than through IT-enabled cost reduction. They also provide important implications for managers to make allocations among discretionary expenditures such as IT, advertising, and R&D. With regard to IT expenditures, the results imply that firms should accord higher priority to IT projects that have revenue growth potential over those that focus mainly on cost savings.
In this study, we investigate the economic and strategic value of open innovation alliances (OIAs), in which collaborators and competitors integrate in the pursuit of the codevelopment of technological innovations. Given that OIAs differ substantially from traditional, closed alliances in many aspects, including their strategic scope and scale, governing mechanisms, and member composition, it is important to understand and assess the potential value inherent in these new modes of collaboration. Furthermore, OIAs evolve over time as the participating members are free to enter and leave at will. Therefore, we also examine the on-going value creation and wealth spillover that result from changes in membership. Moreover, we investigate how a firm’s participation in an IT-based open alliance alters the market value of its rivals operating within the same marketplace. To gain additional insight into the factors that moderate the market valuation of OIA participation, several contextual factors, including the degree of partner heterogeneity, innovation type, and degree of openness of the OIAs are used to account for variability in abnormal returns. Based on 194 observations, we found that allying firms realize significant positive abnormal returns when their entry into an OIA is made public. The results also suggest that substantial excessive returns accrue to the allying firms with the belated entry of a market leader firm. Furthermore, we discovered that a firm’s entry into an OIA increases, rather than decreases, the market valuation of its rivals. Interestingly, an incumbent rival that did not participate in the alliance appears to gain greater “free-riding” benefits from the OIA, as compared to peer rivals. Innovation type and openness were significantly associated with the amount of abnormal returns accruing to allying firms, while no significance was found for partner heterogeneity. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for research and practice with respect to value cocreation in multifirm environments.
Contemporary business organizations are increasingly turning their attention to jointly creating value with a variety of stakeholders, such as individual customers and other business organizations. However, a review of the literature reveals that very few studies have systematically examined value cocreation within business-to-business (B2B) contexts. Using a revelatory case study of the relationship between an ERP vendor with a global reputation and its partners, and informed by the resource-based view of the firm and related theoretical perspectives, we develop an understanding of value cocreation in B2B alliances associated with selling, extending, and implementing packaged software, specifically ERP systems. Our study reveals that there are different mechanisms underlying value cocreation within B2B alliances, and also points to several categories of contingency factors that influence these mechanisms. In addition to providing insights about the phenomenon of cocreation itself, the study contributes to the stream of packaged software literature, where the implications of value cocreation in alliances between packaged software vendors and their partners for the client organizations have not been sufficiently explored.