Business Commons^™

Do Online Consumers Value Corporate Social Responsibility More In Times Of Uncertainty?: Evidence From Online Auctions Conducted During The Onset Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Andrew S. Manikas, James R. Kroes, E. Shaunn Mattingly, Garrett A. Mcbrayer

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

The relationships between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and consumer behaviors have been widely explored in the literature. From the consumer standpoint, it has been shown that individuals largely want to be socially responsible actors and that, more than ever, they consider the CSR aspects of products or services when contemplating purchasing decisions. We utilize data from 23,247 online auctions conducted before and during the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze in what way consumer preferences might be influenced by how the CSR characteristics of products are touted in their descriptions. We find that a greater CSR emphasis is positively associated with an …

Non-Invasive Measurement Of Trust In Group Interactions, Lee A. Spitzley, Xinran Wang, Xunyu Chen, Steven J. Pentland, Jay F. Nunamaker, Judee K. Burgoon, Norah E. Dunbar

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Trust between group members has many implications for how well a group performs. In this study, we predict perceived trustworthiness of group members when there are subversive group members. We collected multimodal verbal and nonverbal data from a group interaction experiment. During the interaction, we periodically surveyed the group members about their perceptions of trustworthiness of other group members. We used this data to model the relationship between observable behavior and perceptions of trustworthiness. We report the most predictive features and describe them in the context of existing literature on verbal and nonverbal correlates of trust. This research advances the …

M&M;'S®, Sampling, And X-Bar/R Control Charts: A Demonstration And Validation, Matthew Castel

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Relaying statistical concepts to students is difficult without "real-world" examples and corresponding data. However, it is difficult to obtain data for student usage, let alone have the data mean something to the student. This paper attempts to provide students with a hands-on demonstration to aid in their understanding and application of control charts using the tangibility of M&M's^®. During the demonstration, students gain an understanding of how to perform sampling, evaluate basic statistics, and leverage tangible data to create x-bar & R charts. The demonstration's effectiveness is then assessed using a post-hoc data analysis of student examination data …

Ais Teaching Curation Project: The Introductory Course In Information Systems, James Burleson, Teagen Nabity-Grover, Karim Jetha

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Association for Information Systems (AIS) Teaching Curation Project aims to highlight and summarize research within the association that focuses on the major courses taught in Information Systems (IS) programs. The present literature review is a companion to a curation website specific to the introductory course in IS. In this review, we identify three major themes that pervade this literature: IS program enrollment, pedagogy, and curriculum. We use these themes to structure our summary of the research on the importance of the introductory course and various approaches to instruction. These themes also provide a framework for positioning future research. For …

Does Accuracy Matter?: Methodological Considerations When Using Automated Speech-To-Text For Social Science Research, Steven J. Pentland, Christie M. Fuller, Lee A. Spitzley, Douglas P. Twitchell

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

The analysis of spoken language has been integral to a breadth of research in social science and beyond. However, for analyses to occur with efficiency, language must be in the form of computer-readable text. Historically, the speech-to-text process has occurred manually using human transcriptionists. Automated speech recognition (ASR) is advertised as an efficient and inexpensive alternative, but research shows this method of speech-to-text is prone to error. This paper investigates the viability of using error prone ASR transcriptions as part of the methodological process of language analysis. Results show that at the individual feature level, analysis of ASR transcriptions differ …

Teaching Tip: Socio-Cultural Learning To Increase Student Engagement In Introduction To Mis, Amy J. Connolly, Leigh A. Mutchler, Daniel E. Rush

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Introduction to Management Information Systems (MIS) is a challenging course to teach because of the broad expanse of rapidlychanging material, the centrality of the course to the business curriculum, students’ demand for interactive teaching rather than traditional lecture, and general student disinterest in or lack of familiarity with the subject. Further compounding these problems, faculty may not be adequately comfortable with or trained in active teaching modalities. To address these challenges, we used principles of socio-cultural learning to design a system of class activities to teach the dynamic concepts commonly found in the Introduction to MIS course. Faculty can adapt …

Manipulating Common Method Variance Via Experimental Conditions, Alison Wall, Marcia Simmering, Christie Fuller, Brian Waterwall

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Research data collected from single respondents may raise concerns regarding common method variance (CMV), which is believed to threaten the validity of findings. The primary concern is that CMV can inflate substantive relationships, such that they appear statistically significant when they are not. Thus, understanding the nature of CMV is critical, especially when one considers the popularity—and sometimes necessity—of using self-report data. Research examining CMV has found conflicting evidence about the impact of CMV. Researchers who believe CMV influences findings have proposed solutions to combat any real or perceived potential bias, including changing survey instructions and using marker variables, but …

Comparing Regions Globally: Impacts Of Covid-19 On Supply Chains – A Delphi Study, Anna Land

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose – The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged supply chains (SCs) around the globe unprecedentedly. This study aims to gain insights on the impacts of the pandemic on SCs and their management under consideration of different regional contexts on a global scale.

Design/methodology/approach – A Delphi study collects the expertise of global SC academics on the SC vulnerabilities and the measures for responding to disruptions, improving resilience, and restoring operations. Data from three polls are systematically analyzed by content, frequency, and cluster analysis.

Findings – The study identifies and ranks ten major issues related to SC vulnerabilities and management strategies for …

The Operational Impacts Of Chief Supply Chain Officers In Manufacturing Firms, James R. Kroes, Andrew S. Manikas, Thomas F. Gattiker, Matthew J. Castel

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Many firms have elevated their supply chain management decision-making responsibilities through the creation of ‘Chief Supply Chain Officer’ (CSCO) positions. This is widely attributed to the recognition that superior supply chain operations can generate a competitive advantage. Prior studies have found that firms with CSCOs outperform firms without CSCOs along many financial dimensions. However, these prior efforts did not examine the pathways by which these improvements occur. This study addresses this gap in the literature by investigating whether supply chain characteristics of manufacturing firms differ within firms with CSCOs. To explore this, we investigate the relationship between CSCOs and operational …

Does The Importance Of Environmental Issues Within An Industry Affect The Relationship Between Lean Operations And Corporate Financial Performance?, Andrew S. Manikas, James R. Kroes, Benjamin P. Foster

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Lean operations and environmental sustainability have been generally accepted to be complementary activities, although prior studies have not found consistent relationships between these factors and corporate financial performance. It has been proposed that these inconsistent findings might be due to industry-specific differences in sustainability. Thus, this study examines: (i) whether the level of leanness in companies is related to the importance of environmental sustainability and (ii) if the relationship between companies’ leanness and their financial performance is heightened by the importance of environmental issues inherent in their industries. To measure the importance of environmental issues in an industry, we employ …

Noteworthy Diversity Efforts And Financial Performance: Evidence From Diversityinc's Top 50, Benjamin P. Foster, Andrew Manikas, Dianna Preece, James R. Kroes

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study provides evidence that diversity efforts are associated with improved organizational performance. We explore the benefits of diversity by analyzing long-term shareholder value (Tobin's q) and short-term performance (return on assets) of companies cited for being leaders in the area of diversity. Tobin's q is significantly higher for companies included on the DiversityInc Top 50 list than other companies, implying that diversity efforts increase long-term shareholder value. Companies on a DiversityInc list also have significantly better short-term financial performance, return on assets, than similar companies in their industry. We also conduct a Granger causation analysis, and the results are …

An Agile Framework For Teaching With Scrum In The It Project Management Classroom, Daniel E. Rush, Amy J. Connolly

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents a framework for teaching a complete, semester-long IT project management course with traditional PMI-based content (sans software development) while featuring Scrum as the organizing logic for accomplishing coursework. This framework adapts widely-used Scrum practices from industry for use in the classroom, including how to organize student teams, homework, and activities. Organizing an existing course with Scrum is intended to maximize student learning of traditional project management content, as well as the difficult-to-teach, socially-complex, “soft” skills that lead to Scrum team success. This deep integration of Scrum into a traditional, predictive IT project management course goes well beyond …

Generating Efficient Rebalancing Routes For Bikeshare Programs Using A Genetic Algorithm, James R. Kroes, Andrew S. Manikas, Thomas F. Gattiker

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Growth in urban areas often leads to problems such as increased traffic congestion and poor air quality. To help alleviate these issues, shared mobility networks have been launched in hundreds of cities worldwide to provide citizens with alternatives to personal autos and to other less sustainable methods of transport (Fishman, 2016; Zhang et al., 2015). Shared mobility includes carsharing, ridesharing, scooter sharing and bikesharing (SAE, 2018). Bikeshare programs allow users to pick up bicycles (often at hub locations), utilize the bicycle for a journey, and return it to a location within the system (DeMaio, 2009). While bicycle sharing has been …

Design Principles For Signal Detection In Modern Job Application Systems: Identifying Fabricated Qualifications, Nathan W. Twyman, Steven J. Pentland, Lee Spitzley

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

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 …

Misalignment Between Societal Well-Being And Business Profit Maximization: The Case Of New York Taxis Drivers’ Incentive System, Andrew S. Manikas, James R. Kroes, Thomas F. Gattiker

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Objectives of business sustainability efforts commonly include increasing consumer safety, decreasing resource consumption, and decreasing pollution. Even though there is a societal interest in attaining these goals, business and other economic agents often operate under incentive structures that run counter to these objectives. Taxi drivers operate as economic independents. Their revenue depends on their fares and tips. Moreover they choose how many hours to work, how fast to drive, and which route to take. Using New York City taxi data from 2013, we test the level of alignment between the revenue maximizing behavior of drivers versus safety, conservation and pollution- …

How Emotional Self-Control Relates To It Mindfulness And Technostress In Students, Amy J. Connolly, Daniel Rush

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Students in IT-intensive courses such as Introduction to MIS must learn new technologies in a short amount of time, similar to self-directed knowledge workers in a company. Technostress reduces employee performance, engagement and satisfaction, but how does it affect business students? Although emotional intelligence has profound effects on student outcomes, its relationship with technostress and IT mindfulness is unexplored. Instructors cannot design effective theoretically-based interventions without understanding the underlying problems that students are experiencing. To address this gap, this paper reviews current literature on these concepts and presents a research model to explore the effects of these relationships in business …

Operational Leanness And Retail Firm Performance Since 1980, James R. Kroes, Andrew S. Manikas, Thomas F. Gattiker

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Lean is one of the most pervasive and powerful paradigms in Operations and Supply Chain Management. As a theory, lean has been well tested in manufacturing. Lean in retail has received less attention. There is good reason to think that seminal constructs from lean, such as inventory slack reduction and capacity slack reduction, may explain a great deal of the variance in retail firm performance. Therefore this paper tests lean-based propositions pertaining to the relationships between inventory slack, capacity slack, market instability and firm market performance. Using retail firm data from a 35 year period, we find that lean thinking …

An Exploration Of ‘Sticky’ Inventory Management In The Manufacturing Industry, James R. Kroes, Andrew S. Manikas

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Traditional models examining relationships between firm resources and revenues assume that the many expenses and asset holdings change in proportion to changes in demand. However, research has found that for many costs and assets assumed to be variable, the magnitude of a change in a cost or asset in proportion to a change in revenue is smaller during periods when revenue decreases compared to the change in the cost or asset when revenue increases. Costs and assets which behave in this manner have been denoted as ‘sticky’ costs or assets. This study examines if inventory in the manufacturing industry is …

Classroom Strategies For Overworked Faculty Of Intro To Mis: Harnessing The Power Of Cooperative Learning, Amy J. Connolly, Daniel Rush

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Many issues complicate the successful academic’s workload, such as declining MIS major enrollments, increased responsibilities, higher publication standards, online teaching, larger class sizes, reduced state funding, and more. On top of this, faculty have a broad selection of teaching methods to learn and choose from with little practical guidance from research or formal doctoral training. In this paper, we present a brief background of some of these methods and then provide simple, easy to implement suggested activities that can be used to increase student interest, engagement, and potentially retention. These activities do not require flipping the classroom or intense training, …

Leveraging Academic Partnerships To Improve Logistics At Nonprofit Organizations, Andrew S. Manikas, James R. Kroes, Thomas F. Gattiker

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article presents the results of a partnership between a nonprofit organization and a team of academic researchers that developed a low-cost spreadsheet-based tool that allows organizations to effectively schedule vehicle operations. Specifically, the tool (1) handles the real-world constraints present in moderately complex logistics environments; and (2) uses general computing hardware and software that is already deployed in most organizations, thereby rendering the solution radically low cost (effectively free). We deployed this tool to a humanitarian organization, the Idaho Foodbank, which realized a substantial improvement in its fleet efficiency and a corresponding reduction in route-planning time. The methodology used …

Designing A Prototype For Analytical Model Selection And Execution To Support Self-Service Bi, Greg Schymik, David Schuff, Karen Corral, Robert St. Louis

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents a prototype of a modeling tool specifically designed for business analysts with little modeling experience. The proposed tool has an interactive user interface for a dimensional data store that contains a library of analytical models that business analysts can evaluate and use to create models they can run on their own data sets. Using a design science approach, we review the relevant literature in self-efficacy and feedforward to provide a kernel theory that informs the design criteria met by our proof of concept prototype. Specifically, we demonstrate the prototype’s user interface with a prediction problem faced by …

Improved Forward Buying Of Commodity Materials, Andrew Manikas, James Kroes

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

This research presents the Enhanced Commodity Forward Buy (ECFB) heuristic, a new method for commodity purchasing, which allows strategic forward buying of commodities for products that include commodity components or materials. The ECFB addresses limitations of existing methods by considering stochastic demand and stochastic commodity prices for products that contain both commodity and non-commodity materials. We conduct a simulation test of the new heuristic on 10 commodity indices using actual historical market prices, over a range of holding costs, markup margins, commodity percentages of the product’s cost of goods sold and demand distributions. The results of the simulation show that …

Metro Meals On Wheels Treasure Valley Employs A Low-Cost Routing Tool To Improve Deliveries, Andrew S. Manikas, James R. Kroes, Thomas F. Gattiker

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper, we discuss a project in which we developed a spreadsheet-based system that interfaces with a no-fee driving-directions application programming interface to quickly and accurately build a travel time and distance matrix and then rapidly determine near-optimal delivery-route schedules using a modified genetic algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, the method we used to create the travel matrix had not been employed previously in an academic study. The tool was tested and refined in a humanitarian setting—a local branch of the Meals on Wheels Association of America (now Meals on Wheels America), an organization that combats hunger …

Automated Feedback As A Convergence Tool, Tim Chenoweth, Karen Corral, Kit Scott

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study evaluates two content delivery options for teaching a programming language to determine whether an asynchronous format can achieve the same learning efficacy as a traditional lecture (face-to-face) format. We use media synchronicity theory as a guide to choose media capabilities to incorporate into an asynchronous tutorial used asynchronously. We conducted an experiment with 49 students from three classes of a web development class at an American university. Our results suggest that an asynchronous tutorial can achieve the same learning outcomes as a traditional lecture format by using automated feedback for convergence. Somewhat surprisingly, we found that performance did …

A Response To The Ais Bright Ict Initiative, Glen Sagers, Douglas P. Twitchell

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

In 2015, the President of the Associate for Information Systems introduced the Bright ICT Initiative (Lee 2015), which provides a framework for improving Internet security based on four principles: origin responsibility, deliverer responsibility, rule-based digital search warrants, and traceable anonymity. We review these principles and show that at least three of these principles are at odds with the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the founding principles of the Internet and may actually decrease individual security. We conclude giving suggestions for developing principles more in line with human rights.

A Newsvendor Approach To Compliance And Production Under Cap And Trade Emissions Regulation, Andrew S. Manikas, James R. Kroes

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Since the 1990s, governmental agencies have increasingly turned to market based cap and trade programs to control the emission of pollutants. Firms subject to cap and trade regulation are typically required to acquire emissions allowances via open auction markets. The cost to acquire allowances may impose a substantial financial burden on a firm. While emissions reduction efforts may eliminate some firm's need to acquire additional allowances, there are still numerous firms that need to purchase additional allowances on the open market. This study presents a new forward buying heuristic, designed for those firms that need to purchase emissions allowances via …

Enabling Self-Service Bi Through A Dimensional Model Management Warehouse, Karen Corral, David Schuff, Gregory Schymik, Robert St. Louis

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

The promise of Self-Service Business Intelligence (BI) is its ability to give business users access to selection, analysis, and reporting tools without requiring intervention from IT. However, while some progress has been made through tools such as SAS Enterprise Miner, IBM SPSS Modeler, and RapidMiner, analytical modeling remains firmly in the domain of IT departments and data scientists. The development of tools that mitigate the need for modeling expertise remains the “missing link” in selfservice BI, but prior attempts at developing modeling languages for nontechnical audiences have gone largely unadopted. This paper seeks to address this unmet need, bringing model-building …

Location Privacy In The Era Of The Internet Of Things And Big Data Analytics, Robert P. Minch

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Location information is generated in large quantities in the Internet of Things and becomes a major component of the big data phenomenon. This results in privacy issues involving sensing, identification, storage, processing, sharing, and use of this information in technical, social, and legal contexts. These issues must be addressed if the IoT is to be widely adopted and accepted. Theory will need to be developed and tested, and new research questions will need to be investigated. This exploratory research begins to identify, classify, and describe these issues and questions.

Managerial Commitment To Sustainable Supply Chain Management Projects, Thomas F. Gattiker, Craig R. Carter, Xiaowen Huang, Wendy L. Tate

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Most companies are under pressure to improve the environmental sustainability of their supply chains. However, there is considerable variance in companies’ ability to successfully deploy environmental management projects. One important factor, according to articles in the academic and business press, is the ability of champions of sustainable supply chain management projects within organizations to gain the commitment of colleagues (e.g., other managers from a variety of functions) to help these projects succeed. Therefore, this paper examines variables that affect a project champion’s ability to gain this commitment from colleagues. In particular, building on existing research from supply chain management and …

Cash Flow Management And Manufacturing Firm Financial Performance: A Longitudinal Perspective, James R. Kroes, Andrew S. Manikas

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

A firm's cash flow policies, which manage working capital in the form of cash receivables from customers, inventory holdings, and cash payments to suppliers, are inexorably linked to the firm's operations. Building on earlier research, this study: (i) extends prior studies by examining the relationships between changes in cash flow measures and changes in firm financial performance using a longitudinal sample of firm data; and (ii) investigates the direction of the relationship between quarterly changes in cash flow positions and firm financial performance. This study is conducted using the Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) methodology to analyze a longitudinal sample of …