Knowledge that Transforms

OES

In the 1960s, software development centered on single-purpose applications to run on stand-alone computers. The intervening decades have seen exponential growth in system complexity with, for example, integrated enterprise-wide suites of integrated capabilities serving users across the globe. Enterprise system infrastructure includes multiple levels of security, collaboration capabilities for the people working as teams, fraud detection, and data fusion, to name but a few. These aspects add to the complexity of the application. Also, software can do more as a result of processing speed and data storage. This special issue presents three papers, each of which considers the complexity of current systems from a different perspective. The first paper, “Decision Problems in Blockchain Governance: Old Wine in New Bottles or Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes? ” by Rafael Ziolkowski, Gianluca Miscione, and Gerhard Schwabe, addresses the complex question of managing software capabilities built on blockchain technology. Current research presents a wide array of novel potentially disruptive blockchain application domains, but a recent Gartner survey of CEO’s found that few companies have current plans to implement such applications. A primary impediment appears to be that managers still do not understand how it works or what they can do with it. This paper focuses on complex issues pertaining to the governance of blockchain systems derived from examination of 14 such systems in four application domains. Based on academic literature, semi-structured interviews with representatives from those organizations, and content analysis of grey literature, common problems in blockchain governance have been singled out and contextualized. The identification of these problems enriches the scarce body of knowledge on the governance of blockchain systems, resulting in a better understanding of how blockchain governance links to existing concepts and how it is enacted in practice. The next paper, “Idea Convergence Quality in Open Innovation Crowdsourcing: A Cognitive Load Perspective” by Xusen Chen, Shizuan Fu, Triparna de Vreede, GertJan de Vreede, Isabella Seeber, Ronald Maier, and Barbara Weber, examines another complexity challenge. Today’s systems can support large-scale collaboration involving hundreds or thousands of people who are using vast stores of semi-structured and unstructured data: how can participants converge on and build shared understanding of the ideas that will be useful for attaining their goals in a short amount of time? This paper prototypes and tests a solution. The exemplar domain for this study is an open innovation crowdsourcing application for online crowds that can quickly converge from massive

OES

Deception is an unfortunate staple in group work. Guarding against team members’ deceptive tactics and alternative agendas is difficult and may seem even more difficult in technology-driven business environments that have made multitasking during teamwork increasingly commonplace. This research develops a foundation for a nuanced theoretical understanding of deception detection under these conditions. The intersection of information technology multitasking and deception detection theories is shown to produce various and sometimes competing ideas about how this type of multitasking might affect truthfulness assessments in real-time teamwork. A laboratory study involving a collaborative game helped evaluate the different ideas using manipulated deception and multitasking behaviors in a real-time, virtual group environment. The results provide evidence that information multitasking can actually improve deception detection, likely because multitaskers engage less in the team conversation, making themselves less manipulable. As understanding of multitasking benefits increases, managers and designers can incorporate effective multitasking into collaborative processes.

With the popularity of open source software (OSS) as an alternative to proprietary software (PS), proprietary-software firms such as IBM and Microsoft started to embrace this new paradigm during the past decades. We analyze how firms choose the software development strategy between OSS and PS, by constructing a duopoly model in which consumers sequentially purchase software and complementary services in a market that exhibits an indirect network effect. We show that a PS firm may benefit from the presence of an OSS firm, and the software market can be dominated by a single OSS if the indirect network effect is weak and the cost saving effect of OSS is negligible. We also show that the market can support two OSS if the cost saving effect of OSS is sizeable, and two PS if firms can provide fully compatible services to competitor’s PS. Building upon the existing works that investigate the competition between PS and OSS, this study improves our understanding of the role of OSS in firm’s software development strategy and market equilibrium.

Hiring a new employee is traditionally thought to be an uncertain investment. This uncertainty is lessened by the presence of signals that indicate job fitness. Ideally, job applicants objectively signal their qualifications, and those signals are correctly assessed by the hiring team. In reality, signal manipulation is pervasive in the hiring process, mitigating the reliability of signals used to make hiring decisions. To combat these inefficiencies, we propose and evaluate SIGHT, a theoretical class of systems affording more robust signal evaluation during the job application process. A prototypical implementation of the SIGHT framework was evaluated using a mock-interview paradigm. Results provide initial evidence that SIGHT systems can elicit and capture qualification signals beyond what can be traditionally obtained from a typical application and that SIGHT systems can assess signals more effectively than unaided decision-making. SIGHT principles may extend to domains such as audit and security interviews.

Software is the lifeblood of technological advancement, and it progresses not only through emerging technologies, but also through the contributions of new generations of developers who have distinct technology-related experiences. We describe our qualitative investigation into how developers, who began regularly using social networking technology at an early age (referred to as precocious users), demonstrate distinct expectations about the goals of software development. We advance a theoretical perspective that explains how the increasingly socially infused nature of networking applications shapes generations of individuals — some of whom will go on to become creative developers in the software industry. Our perspective suggests software organizations can leverage developers who have been precocious users of more recent social networking technologies to reinforce intuitive usage, promote social impact, and re-energize experimentation and contribution to the software community. Our results also offer a comprehensive set of development goals that focus attention towards contemporary expectations about challenging usability and contribution to software ecosystems. We conclude by discussing how our methodological steps, data collection, and data analysis procedures empower future research to explore generational shifts in the career perceptions and competencies of the digital workforce.

This paper investigates how the awareness of a security vulnerability index affects firms’ security protection strategy and how the information awareness effect interacts with firm incentives and country-wide information technology (IT) development level. The security index is constructed based on outgoing spams and phishing website hosting, which may serve as an indicator of a firm’s security controls. To study whether security vulnerability awareness causes firms to improve their security, we conducted a randomized field experiment on 1,262 firms in six Pan-Asian countries and regions. Among 631 randomly selected treated firms, we alerted them of their security vulnerability index and their relative rankings compared to their peers via advisory emails and websites. Difference-in-differences analyses show that compared with the controls, the treated firms improve their security over time, with a statistically significant reduction of outgoing spam volume according to one of the data sources but not phishing website hosting. However, a statistically significant reduction in phishing website hosting was observed among non-web hosting firms, suggesting that firms’ underlying incentives play an important role in the treatment effect. Lastly, exploiting the multi-country nature of the data, we found that firms in countries with high information and communications technology (ICT) development are more responsive to our intervention because they have higher IT capabilities and more resources to resolve security issues. Our study provides cybersecurity policymakers with useful insights on how firm incentives and ICT environments play roles in firms’ security measure adoption.

We discuss the economic impacts of the interplay between vertical integration and zero-rating for digital content. To this end, we develop a game-theoretic model that involves an Internet Service Provider (ISP), two competing content providers (CPs)—one an ad-supported CP, the other ad-free—and consumers. While previous studies have separately examined vertical integration and zero-rated content, none to our knowledge has explored the simultaneous interaction of both phenomena, which became apparent after the historic merger of AT&T and Time Warner. This vertical integration of an ISP and a CP has sparked an intense debate among policymakers and practitioners alike over the economic implications and consequent business practices (e.g., zero-rated content). The results of our analysis show that an ISP can generate higher profits after the merger with zero-rated content. Surprisingly, we find that the consumer valuation of the ad-free content significantly affects how the ISP will decide to maximize its profit. We extend our model to additionally consider the CPs’ partial sponsorship of their consumers’ data usage as well as the ISP’s different pricing schemes for its consumers and the CPs. Our analysis, which illustrates the various arrangements between vertical integration and zero-rated content, and our findings on consumer surplus and social welfare should be helpful to policymakers as well as to the ISPs, CPs, and consumers of digital content.

This study focuses on app innovations based on mobile platform innovations (MPIs), examining how app developers can time the app innovations release to best leverage MPIs and increase app financial performance. We suggest that the performance is contingent on the adoption curve of mobile platform generations and the level of backward compatibility of the MPIs. We find support for our hypotheses after analyzing 1,213 MPI-based app innovations on the iOS mobile platform ecosystem. The main theoretical contribution of this study, supported empirically, is to better understand the role of the platform generation adoption curve and MPIs’ level of backward compatibility in the assessment of the effect of MPI-based app innovation release timing on complementor’s performance. We encourage third-party developers to create MPI-based app innovations more prominently and release them early during the growth stage of the adoption curve while prioritizing MPIs with no backward compatibility.