This research explores the effect of the introduction of online reverse auctions (ORAs) on interorganizational trust between buyers and suppliers in the retail industry. Building upon the notion of...
Robert O. Briggs is Director of Academic Affairs for the Institute for Collaboration Science and Professor of Marketing and Management at the University of Nebraska. He earned his Ph.D. in Management and Information Systems from the University of Arizona in 1994. He researches the theoretical foundations of collaboration and applies his findings to the design and deployment of new collaboration technologies and work practices. He is a codeveloper of the collaboration engineering discipline, and coinventor of the ThinkLets design pattern language for collaboration processes. He has published more than 100 scholarly works on theoretical, experimental, and technical aspects of collaboration.
(2008). Special Issue: Impact of Information Systems on Market Structure and Function: Developing and Testing Theories. Journal of Management Information Systems: Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 7-12.
We develop three auction-based pricing and allocation solution methods for the case where a capacity-constrained online service provider offers multiple classes of unique, one-time services with differentiated quality. Consumers desire exactly one of the many service classes offered. We call such a setting a vertically integrated online services market. Examples of these services are webcasting of special events over the Internet, provision of video-on-demand, and allocation of grid computing resources. We model the pricing and allocation decision faced by firms in such a setting as a knapsack problem with an added preference elicitation dimension. We present a variety of computational solution approaches based on adaptations of the traditional greedy heuristic for knapsack problems. The solution approaches vary in efficacy depending on whether bidders are restricted to bid in one service class or allowed to bid in multiple service classes, as well as on the overall variability of the demand. In the case bidders can bid in multiple classes but are interested in consuming only one service class, a direct application of the heuristics developed for the single service case results in a nonfair allocation. We develop a novel data structure to eliminate the unfair allocation while maintaining the original computation complexity of the simpler setting. The paper contributes by presenting a menu of auction clearing mechanisms for selling vertically integrated online services. Keywords: auction-based pricingonline servicesservice classesservice computingservice pricing
E-markets have been established in many industries as a sourcing option for buyers. The existing literature focuses on the substitutional effect of e-markets on the traditional supply chain, yet in many situations, e-markets are used by buyers as a benchmarking tool in negotiations with traditional suppliers. This paper examines the role of e-markets in price negotiations and relationship-specific investments. We find that e-markets can be an effective tool to stimulate the traditional supplier's relationship-specific investments, lower the procurement prices, and improve the buyer's profitability and the supply-chain efficiency. Therefore, e-markets can complement rather than substitute for the traditional relationship-based supply chain. When there is quality uncertainty in the e-market offering, two effects of quality uncertainty on e-market adoption are identified. Better quality on average will increase e-market adoption, but surprisingly, increasing quality dispersion of e-markets will also help. Therefore, e-markets should strive to enlist suppliers with better quality products, but do not need to worry too much about the quality dispersion. Having better price transparency will also help in attracting more business from buyers.
The Internet provides an additional channel for manufacturers to provide information about and sell their products. The electronic channel has the advantage of reduced search cost and its reach is increasing, but it has limited capability to provide product information. This paper examines how Internet technology affects a monopoly manufacturer's distribution problem in an environment where product information is important for consumers to identify their ideal product. The model suggests that a manufacturer uses the electronic channel in addition to the physical channel when the product information is very valuable and product information is largely about digital attributes, or when the product information is not valuable. The model also suggests that when the manufacturer chooses to sell through both channels, there is an increase in price competition between the two channels such that the manufacturer need not sell through the electronic retailer with the highest reach. Also, when a large proportion of consumers have access to both channels, the manufacturer may sell through only one channel. The paper also examines the case where the manufacturer operates in the electronic channel and the case where the retailers are integrated. Keywords: channel managementdistribution strategyelectronic commercefree ridinggame theoryproduct informationsearch cost
Classical negotiation models are weak in supporting real-world business negotiations because these models often assume that the preference information of each negotiator is made public. Although parametric learning methods have been proposed for acquiring the preference information of negotiation opponents, these methods suffer from the strong assumptions about the specific utility function and negotiation mechanism employed by the opponents. Consequently, it is difficult to apply these learning methods to the heterogeneous negotiation agents participating in e-marketplaces. This paper illustrates the design, development, and evaluation of a nonparametric negotiation knowledge discovery method which is underpinned by the well-known Bayesian learning paradigm. According to our empirical testing, the novel knowledge discovery method can speed up the negotiation processes while maintaining negotiation effectiveness. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first nonparametric negotiation knowledge discovery method developed and evaluated in the context of multi-issue bargaining over e-marketplaces. Keywords: Bayesian learninge-businessknowledge discoverymultiissue bargainingnegotiation
The availability of data on the Web and new data extraction technologies have made it increasingly easy to reuse existing data to create new databases and provide value-added services. Meanwhile, database creators have been seeking legal protection for their data, such as the European Union's Database Directive. The legislative development shows that there is significant difficulty in finding the right balance between protecting the incentives of creating publicly accessible databases (including semistructured Web sites) and preserving adequate access to factual data for value-creating activities. We address this issue using an extended spatial competition model that explicitly considers licensing provisions and inefficiencies in policy administration. The results show that, depending on the cost level of database creation, the degree of differentiation of the reuser database, and the efficiency of policy administration, there are different socially beneficial policy choices, such as protecting a legal monopoly, encouraging competition via compulsory licensing, discouraging voluntary licensing, or even allowing free riding. With the appropriate policy in place, both the creators and the reusers should focus on innovation that can increase the variety of databases and create value from database contents.
The use of a well-defined process is a widely recognized approach to increasing quality and productivity in software development. Building software processes from scratch each time is expensive and risky. Therefore, they are often created by tailoring existing processes and standards. Process tailoring is a knowledge-intensive activity. This research explores the link between knowledge support and software process tailoring performance under different levels of tailoring task complexity. It theoretically develops and tests how the fit between knowledge (generalized and contextualized) and software tailoring task complexity influences process tailoring performance. Process tailoring performance is conceptualized in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. The results from an experiment and a protocol analysis show that contextualized knowledge outperforms generalized knowledge in improving tailoring performance, and that such improvement in performance is greater in complex process tailoring tasks when compared to simple tasks. Keywords: contextualized knowledgegeneralized knowledgeknowledge managementsoftware processsoftware process tailoring
Information systems can serve as intermediaries between the buyers and the sellers in a market, creating an "electronic marketplace" that lowers the buyers' cost to acquire information about sellers' prices and product offerings. Although electronic trading systems provide potential to create an efficient market structure, we witness that a $45 trillion fixed-income market still makes little use of these systems. Low penetration of electronic trading systems in the marketplace is at odds with the existing information technology research doctrine. The reason is that the creation of efficient market structure through an electronic marketplace is based on macro-level interfirm relationships that do not take into account the recurrent micro-level, interpersonal interaction among the market actors. Our empirical investigation, based on face-to-face interviews with 90 fixed-income senior managers and traders from 25 financial institutions, provides a unique insight into the social capital based on social networks of interpersonal relationships in the fixed-income market. Our research findings show that the market structure of embedded interpersonal ties enables participants to take advantage of information asymmetry for profit taking. As a result, imposition of solely electronic trading systems on the present fixed-income market structure is at odds with the present interfirm market norms and business processes enacted for large transactions among market makers and institutional investors.