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.

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

In this paper, we study the economic impact of piracy on the supply chain of information goods. When information goods are sold to consumers via a retailer, in certain situations, a moderate level of piracy seems to have a surprising positive impact on the profits of the manufacturer and the retailer while, at the same time, enhancing consumer welfare. Such a “win–win–win” situation is not only good for the supply chain, but is also beneficial for the overall economy. The economic rationale for this surprising result is rooted in how piracy interacts with double marginalization. We explain this rationale and develop useful insights for management and policy.

In the context of software platforms, we examine how cross-side network effects (CNEs) on different platform sides (app-side and user-side) are temporally asymmetric, and how these CNEs are influenced by the platform’s governance policies. Informed by a perspective of value creation and capture, we theorize how the app-side and the user-side react to each other with distinct value creation/capture processes, and how these processes are influenced by the platform’s governance policies on app review and platform updates. We use a time-series analysis to empirically investigate the platform ecosystem of a leading web browser. Our findings suggest that while the growth in platform usage results in long-term growth in both the number and variety of apps, the growth in the number of apps and the variety of apps only leads to short-term growth in platform usage. We also find that long app review time weakens the long-term CNE of the user-side on the app-side, but not the short-term CNE of the app-side on the user-side. Moreover, we find that frequent platform updates weaken the CNEs of both the user-side and the app-side on each other. These findings generate important implications regarding how a software platform may better govern its ecosystem with different participants.

Certification mechanisms are often employed to assess and signal difficult-to-observe management practices and foster improvement. In the U.S. healthcare sector, a certification mechanism called meaningful-use attestation was recently adopted as part of an effort to encourage electronic health record (EHR) adoption while also focusing healthcare providers on protecting sensitive healthcare data. This new regime motivated us to examine how meaningful-use attestation influences the occurrence of data breaches. Using a propensity score matching technique combined with a difference-in-differences (DID) approach, our study shows that the impact of meaningful-use attestation is contingent on the nature of data breaches and the time frame. Hospitals that attest to having reached Stage 1 meaningful-use standards observe fewer external breaches in the short term, but do not see continued improvement in the following year. On the other hand, attesting hospitals observe short-term increases in accidental internal breaches but eventually see long-term reductions. We do not find any link between malicious internal breaches and attestation. Our findings offer theoretical and practical insights into the effective design of certification mechanisms.

Cognitive research suggests that understanding the semantics, or the meaning, of representations involves both ascension from concrete concepts denoting specific observations (that is, extension) to abstract concepts denoting a number of observations (that is, intension), and vice versa. Consonantly, extant conceptual schemas can encode the semantics of a domain intensionally (e.g., ER diagram, UML class diagram) or extensionally (e.g., set diagram, UML object diagram). However, prior IS research has exclusively focused on intensional representations and the role they play in aiding domain understanding. In this research, we compare the inter-pretational fidelity of two types of representational encoding of cardinality constraints, an intensional schema using an ER diagram and its extensional analog using a set diagram. We employ cognitive science research to conceptualize that extensional representations will enable enhanced understanding as compared with inten-sional representations. Further, given that prior research suggests that the semantics of cardinality constraints remain challenging to understand, we focus on mandatory and optional cardinality constraints associated with relationships in these representations. Based on our laboratory experiments, we find that understanding with an extensional representation was (1) at least as good as that with an intensional representation for mandatory cardinality constraints and (2) significantly better for optional cardinality constraints. We also conducted an applicability check of our results via focus groups and found support for the perceived significance of extensional representations in practice. Overall, this research suggests that the tradition in IS research of exclusively focusing on intensional encoding of domain semantics should be reexamined.

IS research has been categorized in terms of traditions or paradigms: behavioral, design science, economics, and organizational, or some variants of this labeling.Behavioral IS researchers investigated research questions related to micro-or meso-level IS phenomena (e.g., IS use, decision making, trust), informed their work by drawing on theories from reference disciplines such as psychology and social psychology, and used social science research methods such as surveys, lab experiments, field studies, and qualitative approaches.IS design science researchers informed their work with kernel theories and created and evaluated IS artifacts to solve problems and establish new (better) realities.IS economics researchers investigated research questions related to value of IS (e.g., IT business value), informed their work by drawing on theories from economics and used economics research methods such as analytical modeling and econometrics.Those interested in organizational IS research (e.g., IS capabilities, governance) informed their work by relevant macro-level theories in strategy, economics, industrial-organizational psychology, and organizational sociology, and used a combination of social science and economics related methods.These categories of IS research worked quite well to classify the diversity of the IS research when there was a tight coupling between the types of research questions, the informing theoretical perspectives and reference disciplines, and the research methods.

As the nature of information systems (IS) has evolved from primarily standalone, to enterprise, and distributed applications, the need for a better understanding of collective IS use has become a research and practical necessity. In view of contributing to this understanding, we conceptually define collective IS use as a unit level construct, rooted in instances of individual-level IS use within the context of a common work process. Its emergence from the individual to the unit level is shaped by different configurations of task, user, and system interdependence between instances of individual-level IS use. On the basis of this definition, we propose a typology of collective IS use that comprises four ideal types, namely siloed use, processual use, coalesced use, and networked use. For each ideal type, we theorize on the emergence process from the individual to the unit level and we consider the measurement implications for each.