Business Commons^™

User Choice Between Traditional And Computerized Methods: An Activity Perspective, Jun Sun

Information Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

Numerous computerized methods emerge to replace traditional methods in people’s personal, work and social lives, but many are hesitant to make the transition. This study examines the factors that influence human choice between different methods. According to Activity Theory, traditional and computerized methods are both tools that a person uses for a certain task. The situated experiences with various methods shape people’s attitude toward using them later in terms of tool readiness. The understanding leads to hypothesized relationships between user-, method- and task-specific factors and the dependent variable. The results from an empirical study support that method experiences have strong …

Are There Contagion Effects In Information Technology And Business Process Outsourcing?, Arti Mann, Robert J. Kauffman, Kunsoo Han, Barrie R. Nault

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We model the diffusion of IT outsourcing using announcements about IT outsourcing deals. We estimate a lognormal diffusion curve to test whether IT outsourcing follows a pure diffusion process or there are contagion effects involved. The methodology permits us to study the consequences of outsourcing events, especially mega-deals with IT contract amounts that exceed US$1 billion. Mega-deals act, we theorize, as precipitating events that create a strong basis for contagion effects and are likely to affect decision-making by other firms in an industry. Then, we evaluate the role of different communication channels in the diffusion process of IT outsourcing by …

Identifying Social Influence In Networks Using Randomized Experiments, Sinan Aral, Dylan Walker

Business Faculty Articles and Research

The recent availability of massive amounts of networked data generated by email, instant messaging, mobile phone communications, micro blogs, and online social networks is enabling studies of population-level human interaction on scales orders of magnitude greater than what was previously possible.1'2 One important goal of applying statistical inference techniques to large networked datasets is to understand how behavioral contagions spread in human social networks. More precisely, understanding how people influence or are influenced by their peers can help us understand the ebb and flow of market trends, product adoption and diffusion, the spread of health behaviors such as smoking and …

Evaluating And Implementing Web Scale Discovery Services: Part Two, Jason Vaughan, Tamera Hanken

Library Faculty Presentations

Part Four: Quick Tour of the Current Marketplace:

• "The Big 5"
• Similarities and differences

Part Five: It's Not All Sliced Bread:

• Shortcomings of web scale discovery

Part Six: Implementation (pre launch steps):

• Selecting and preparing implementation staff
• Preparing and communicating process/decisions with all staff
• Working with the vendor (roles, expectations, timeline)
• Workflow changes and implications (technical services)

Part Seven: Specific implementation tasks, issues, and considerations:

• Record loading and mapping (catalog content)
• Harvesting and mapping digital/local content
• Working with central index data (internal & external content)
• Web integration and customization
• Assessment and continuous improvement

Evaluating And Implementing Web Scale Discovery Services: Part One, Jason Vaughan, Tamera Hanken

Library Faculty Presentations

Preface: Before Web Scale Discovery

• A very brief overview

Part 1: What is Web Scale Discovery

• Content
• Technology

Part 2: Why is Web Scale Discovery important?

• What’s the need?
• How is it different from earlier attempts at broad discovery?

Part 3: A Framework for Evaluating Web Scale Discovery Services

• What we did at UNLV
• Other options

Assessing Differences Between Physician's Realized And Anticipated Gains From Electronic Health Record Adoption, Lori T. Peterson, Eric W. Ford, John Eberhardt, T. R. Huerta

Business Faculty Publications

Return on investment (ROI) concerns related to Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are a major barrier to the technology’s adoption. Physicians generally rely upon early adopters to vet new technologies prior to putting them into widespread use. Therefore, early adopters’ experiences with EHRs play a major role in determining future adoption patterns. The paper’s purposes are: (1) to map the EHR value streams that define the ROI calculation; and (2) to compare Current Users’ and Intended Adopters’ perceived value streams to identify similarities, differences and governing constructs. Primary data was collected by the Texas Medical Association, which surveyed 1,772 physicians on …

Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion Strategy For On-Line Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Peilin Zhao, Vivek Gopalkrishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On-line portfolio selection has been attracting increasing attention from the data mining and machine learning communities. All existing on-line portfolio selection strategies focus on the first order information of a portfolio vector, though the second order information may also be beneficial to a strategy. Moreover, empirical evidences show that the stock price relatives may follow the mean reversion property, which has not been fully exploited by existing strategies. This article proposes a novel on-line portfolio selection strategy named ``Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion'' (CWMR). Inspired by the mean reversion principle in finance and confidence weighted online learning technique in machine learning, …

Predicting Item Adoption Using Social Correlation, Freddy Chong-Tat Chua, Hady W. Lauw, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Users face a dazzling array of choices on the Web when it comes to choosing which product to buy, which video to watch, etc. The trend of social information processing means users increasingly rely not only on their own preferences, but also on friends when making various adoption decisions. In this paper, we investigate the effects of social correlation on users’ adoption of items. Given a user-user social graph and an item-user adoption graph, we seek to answer the following questions: 1) whether the items adopted by a user correlate to items adopted by her friends, and 2) how to …

Corn: Correlation-Driven Nonparametric Learning Approach For Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Vivekanand Gopalkrishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Machine learning techniques have been adopted to select portfolios from financial markets in some emerging intelligent business applications. In this article, we propose a novel learning-to-trade algorithm termed CO Relation-driven Nonparametric learning strategy (CORN) for actively trading stocks. CORN effectively exploits statistical relations between stock market windows via a nonparametric learning approach. We evaluate the empirical performance of our algorithm extensively on several large historical and latest real stock markets, and show that it can easily beat both the market index and the best stock in the market substantially (without or with small transaction costs), and also surpass a variety …

Fraud Detection In Online Consumer Reviews, Nan Hu, Ling Liu, Vallabh Sambamurthy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Increasingly, consumers depend on social information channels, such as user-posted online reviews, to make purchase decisions. These reviews are assumed to be unbiased reflections of other consumers' experiences with the products or services. While extensively assumed, the literature has not tested the existence or non-existence of review manipulation. By using data from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, our study investigates if vendors, publishers, and writers consistently manipulate online consumer reviews. We document the existence of online review manipulation and show that the manipulation strategy of firms seems to be a monotonically decreasing function of the product's true quality or the …

Towards Evaluating The Quality Of A Spreadsheet: The Case Of The Analytical Spreadsheet Model, Thomas A. Grossman Jr., Vijay Mehrotra, J Sander

Business Analytics and Information Systems

We consider the challenge of creating guidelines to evaluate the quality of a spreadsheet model. We suggest four principles. First, state the domain—the spreadsheets to which the guidelines apply. Second, distinguish between the process by which a spreadsheet is constructed from the resulting spreadsheet artifact. Third, guidelines should be written in terms of the artifact, independent of the process. Fourth, the meaning of “quality” must be defined. We illustrate these principles with an example. We define the domain of “analytical spreadsheet models”, which are used in business, finance, engineering, and science. We propose for discussion a framework and terminology for …

How Cios Overcome The Competing Values Challenge: Irish Cios’ Perspectives, Harvey Enns, Dean B. Mcfarlin, Paul B. Sweeney

MIS/OM/DS Faculty Publications

Competing values are a fact of organizational life. However, there are gaps in our understanding about how these opposing beliefs hinder influence processes. This article draws on interview data to demonstrate how Irish Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are able to convince their colleagues to support new projects within their firms in the face of competing values. Focused interviews were used to explore the influence process and the competing values phenomenon, since this type of research is at an early stage and qualitative methods and analysis serve as a rich source of theory development.

The data showed that the CIOs who …