Business Commons^™

Serious Games: An Evaluation Framework And Case Study, David W. Wilson, Jeff Jenkins, Nathan Twyman, Matthew Jensen, Joe Valacich, Norah Dunbar, Scott Wilson, Claude Miller, Bradley Adame, Yu-Hao Lee, Judee Burgoon, Jay F. Nunamaker

Faculty Publications

Serious games show promise as an effective training method, but such games are complex and few guidelines exist for their effective evaluation. We draw on the design science literature to develop a serious game evaluation framework that emphasizes grounding evaluation in each of four key areas— theoretical, technical, empirical, and external. We further recommend that serious game developers assume an iterative, adaptive approach to grounding an evaluation effort in these four areas, emphasizing some areas more than others at different stages of the development cycle. We illustrate our framework using a case study of a large-scale serious game development project. …

Assessing Users Satisfaction With Web Digital Library: The Case Of Universiti Teknologi Mara, Mohamad Noorman Masrek, James Eric Gaskin

Faculty Publications

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of user satisfaction in the context of academic web digital library (DL). A model based on the re-specified information system success model was developed and tested using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique.

Design/methodology/approach – The study employed survey research methodology with self-administered questionnaire as the research instrument. The questionnaire was developed based on the instruments used by previous researchers. The population of the study was students enrolled for the bachelor’s degree in the Faculty of Information Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. These students were chosen because of …

Integrating Facial Cues Of Threat Into Security Warnings–An Fmri And Field Study, David Eargle, Dennis Galletta, C. Brock Kirwan, Anthony Vance, Jeffrey L. Jenkins

Faculty Publications

Security risks often occur because insiders fail to react appropriately to security warnings, due to inattention to the warnings. This study extends security warning design research that has investigated the impact of different designs, including different symbols of threat such as yellow triangles and exclamation marks.

This work uses media naturalness theory in an attempt to boost user engagement with security warnings. We integrated validated images of facial expressions depicting fear and disgust, which signaled an environmental threat, into a browser security warning. An fMRI study (N=23) revealed activity located in the right amygdala to be differentially associated among warnings …

Real-Time Hand Tremor Detection Via Mouse Cursor Movements For Improved Human-Computer Interactions: An Exploratory Study, Parker A. Williams, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Joseph S. Valacich

Faculty Publications

Millions of people experience hand-tremors—rhythmic oscillation of the fingers, hands, or arm that cause shaking in the hand. People who experience hand tremors often experience difficulty in human computer interactions. For example, when browsing a website, people with hand tremors may have difficulty navigating or clicking on links in the website. With sever hand tremors, effective computing is difficult without assistance. Past research has developed interventions that can be automatically deployed by a website to make it more accessible to people with hand tremors. We build on this research by creating a methodology to unobtrusively detect hand tremors, allowing these …

To Email Or Not To Email: The Impact Of Media On Psychophysiological Responses And Emotional Content In Utilitarian And Romantic Communication, Taylor M. Wells, Alan R. Dennis

Faculty Publications

Lean asynchronous computer mediated communication is often considered poor for communicating emotion, yet individuals continue to use it for business, personal, and even romantic communication.We used a lab experiment to investigate the influence of media (email and voicemail) and task type (romantic and utilitarian) on both the psychophysiological responses of senders and the content of the resulting messages. Message senders had more arousing physiological responses when sending emails than when leaving voicemails. An interaction exists between media and task such that the content of romantic email messages was more positive than romantic voicemails; while the opposite was true for utilitarian …

Pipes, Pools And Filters: How Collaboration Networks Affect Innovative Performance, Harpeet Singh, David Kryscynski, Xinxin Li, Ram Gopal

Faculty Publications

Innovation requires inventors to have both "new knowledge" and the ability to combine and configure knowledge (i.e. "combinatory knowledge") and such knowledge may flow through networks. We argue that both combinatory knowledge and new knowledge are accessed through collaboration networks, but that inventors' abilities to access such knowledge depends on its location in the network. Combinatory knowledge transfers from direct contacts, but not easily from indirect contacts. In contrast, new knowledge transfers from both direct and indirect contacts, but is far more likely to be new and useful when it comes from indirect contacts. Exploring knowledge flows in 69,476 patents …

Comparing The Publication Process In Accounting, Economics, Finance, Management, Marketing, Psychology, And The Natural Sciences, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

I present two types of data about the publication and review process in the accounting, economics, finance, management, marketing, psychology, and natural science disciplines. First, I collect all articles published in 2012 in top tier journals of these disciplines and compare the articles based on word counts, figures and tables included in each article, the time it took to be published, citations, the number of co-authors, and submission fees. I then survey academics in each discipline. Survey questions were designed to evaluate overall perceptions of the review process; changes in the review process in the last 5 years; opinions about …

Do Managers Really Guide Through The Fog? On The Challenges In Assessing The Causes Of Voluntary Disclosure, Travis Dyer, Mark Lang, Lorien Stice-Lawrence

Faculty Publications

Guay e tal. (2016) document that firms with longer and more complex 10-Ks provide  relatively more voluntary disclosure, which they interpret as evidence that managers use voluntary disclosure to mitigate negative effects of complex mandatory disclosure. We review the results of Guay et al. and focus on two main challenges to inferring causality: (1) the coincidence of upward over-time trends in annual report length, complexity, and voluntary disclosure, and (2) the potential for omitted correlated variables, such as changes in firm economics, to drive changes in 10-K textual characteristics and voluntary disclosure. While the results in Guay et al. are …

How Do Firms Use Cash Tax Savings: A Cross-Country Analysis, Danielle Higgins Green, Jon Kerr

Faculty Publications

Cash tax avoidance activities can serves as a significant source of additional cash flows for firms; how managers utilize this additional cash source and the resulting consequences is an empirical question. To answer our research question, we examine the association between the spread between a country’s enacted statutory rate for the year and the cash effective tax rate, and two uses of cash – investment and dividend payout – for an international sample of firms. In the cross-section, we find the firms are more likely to invest cash tax savings rather than distribute them in the form of dividends and …

Portfolio Spillovers And A Limit To Diversification, Bronson Argyle

Faculty Publications

Securities are exposed to the return shocks of seemingly unrelated securities in common mutual fund portfolios. Shocks to firm returns mechanically affect fund returns that hold these securities, which induce investor-driven flows and rebalancing, resulting in temporary flow-induced price pressure (FIPP) on other firms in common portfolios. Instrumenting to address flow/return endogeneity, a one standard deviation increase in the FIPP corresponds to a 15-60 bps increase in daily abnormal firm returns. This pressure reverses in 5-6 days and is larger for liquid firms and for funds experiencing outflows. Failing to properly estimate this correlation implies that an investor is exposed …

Does Use Tax Evasion Provide A Competitive Advantage To E-Tailers?, Jeffrey L. Hoopes, Jacob Thornock, Braden M. Williams

Faculty Publications

Many online retail firms (e-tailers) do not collect sales tax from the majority of their customers. This practice provides these firms with a potential competitive advantage over traditional retailers. We examine stock market returns and analysts' sales forecast revisions surrounding federal legislative proposals, such as the Marketplace Fairness Act, that could erode this alleged competitive advantage for e-tailers. Following events that indicated an increased likelihood of federal sales tax legislation, we find negative abnormal stock returns for e-tail firms relative to traditional retail firms. We also find that analysts forecast a future reduction in sales revenue for e-tailers. These findings …

Assessing Alternative Techniques For Scaling The Family Leisure Activity Profile: Recommendations For Future Family Leisure Measurement, Karen K. Melton, Gary Ellis, Ramon Zabriskie

Faculty Publications

Psychometric properties of the Family Leisure Activity Profile (FLAP) were evaluated using family leisure and family functioning ratings from 884 parents and children residing in the United Kingdom. Review and critique of the FLAP resulted in identification and evaluation of three alternative scaling techniques. Scaling Technique 1was current practice, Technique 2 focused on family leisure environments rather than family leisure activities, and Technique 3 involved generating an estimate of duration of participation in family leisure in natural units of time. Inter-rater agreement and reliability were strong for all three scaling techniques. Technique 3 yielded the best model fit. Empirical relations …

Compensation Or Feedback: Motivating Performance In Multidimensional Tasks, Margaret H. Christ, Scott A. Emett, William B. Tayler, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

Employees often perform tasks with multiple dimensions. In this study, we examine how employees' performance on multidimensional tasks differs under different control structures. We conduct two experiments in which we manipulate the presence of compensation controls and the presence of feedback controls on multiple task dimensions. Our findings suggest that when employees are compensated on multiple dimensions they commit to multiple goals and divide their attention among those task dimensions. However, when feedback controls are implemented on one task dimension with compensation controls on another dimension, employees can improve performance on individual dimensions as well as their overall task performance. …

Applying Basic Gamification Techniques To It Compliance Training: Evidence From The Lab And Field, Ryan J. Baxter, D. Kip Holderness, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

Companies depend on strong internal controls to protect the integrity of accounting information systems. IT security and data privacy training are critical controls to safeguarding company information. However, employees often dislike the training, which can cause a lack of attention to and poor understanding of training concepts, leading to less effective internal controls. To improve the training experience, companies are implementing principles of games into employee training modules; a practice known as gamification. Using a laboratory experiment of data privacy training and a field study involving a publicly-traded bank’s rollout of IT security training, we test whether a training environment …

Your Memory Is Working Against You: How Eye Tracking And Memory Explain Habituation To Security Warnings, Bonnie Anderson, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Anthony Vance, C. Brock Kirwan, David Eargle

Faculty Publications

Securitywarnings are critical to the security of end users and their organizations, often representing the final defense against an attack. Because warnings require users to make a contextual judgment, it is critical that they pay close attention to warnings. However, research shows that users routinely disregard them. A major factor contributing to the ineffectiveness of warnings is habituation, the decreased response to a repeated warning. Although previous research has identified the problem of habituation, the phenomenon has only been observed indirectly through behavioral measures. Therefore, it is unclear how habituation develops in the brain in response to security warnings, and …

The Mediating Effects Of Autonomy, Competence, And Relatedness During Couple Leisure On The Relationship Between Total Couple Leisure Satisfaction And Marital Satisfaction, Miriam Puerta Amato, Neil Lundberg, Peter Ward, Bruce G. Schaalje, Ramon Zabriskie

Faculty Publications

This study tested Self-Determination Theory as a possible explanatory framework to understand the relationship between total couple leisure satisfaction and marital satisfaction. The three psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness—fundamental components of Self-Determination Theory—were measured through the Fulfillment of Psychological Needs during Couple Leisure (FPNL) scale and were tested as mediators. The analysis of five structural equation models confirmed the relevance of the Self-Determination Theory in explaining the relationship between couple leisure satisfaction and marital satisfaction. Although autonomy and competence were significant mediators, relatedness consistently appeared as the strongest mediator suggesting that the fulfillment of this psychological need is …

Mitigating Bias Blind Spot Via A Serious Video Game, Elena Bessarabova, Cameron W. Piercy, Shawn King, Cindy Vincent, Norah E. Dunbar, Judee K. Burgoon, Claude H. Miller, Matthew Jensen, Aaron Elkins, David W. Wilson, Scott N. Wilson, Yu-Hao Lee

Faculty Publications

We employed a serious video game to train participants on bias blind spot (BBS), capturing training effects on BBS mitigation and knowledge at three points in time. Experiment 1 (N ¼ 703) compared the effects of hybrid training (a combination of implicit and explicit training) to implicit training; Experiment 2 (N ¼ 620) tested the effects of just-in-time versus delayed feedback; and Experiment 3 (N ¼ 626) examined the effects of singleplayer versus multiplayer learning environments. We also tested differences in game duration (30 vs. 60 min play) and repetition (single vs. repeated play). Overall, the video game decreased BBS …

Being Student And Practitioner Centered: Lessons Learned From Integrating A Recreation Management Department Into A Business School, Patti A. Freeman, Mat D. Duerden, Brian J. Hill

Faculty Publications

In July 2009, Brigham Young University’s Recreation Management (RecM) Department moved to the Marriott School of Management (MSM), beginning its integration into a nationally ranked business school, including the transition from a college with little coordination between departments to one where all majors share a common core of classes. Despite initial feelings of uncertainty, many insights over time emerged as to how the RecM department could better serve students and professionals. This paper shares some of the lessons the RecM Department learned that hold applicability for other recreation departments, including the (1) influence of names on external perceptions and curriculum, …

Adolescent Summer Camp Volunteers’Attitudes Toward Peers With Disabilities, Megan Fort, Neil Lundberg, Ramon Zabriskie, Dennis Eggett, Mary Anne Prater, Keith Barney

Faculty Publications

This study explored themalleability of adolescent attitudes toward their peers with disabilities after volunteering in a summer day-camp. The Contact with Disabled Persons Scale (CDP) and the Multi-Dimensional Attitude Scale (MAS) were used to collect data in order to determine the association between volunteering in a recreation-based summer day camp and adolescent attitudes toward disability. After a covariateadjusted regression analysis, contact with individuals with disabilities was found to significantly predict change in attitudes toward disability. Dyadic interviews were held after camp participation to provide additional sources of data with potential for deeper understanding of the camp experience for volunteers. The …

In The Pursuit Of Happiness All Family Leisure Is Not Equal, Karen K. Melton, Ramon Zabriskie

Faculty Publications

In the context of family leisure, individuals are more likely to achieve happiness when recreating with their families in predictable activities and in familiar environments. This hypothesis was tested by comparing three models predicting individual happiness. The three models were grounded in distinct frameworks of family leisure incongruity: (a) the null model – all family leisure is equal; (b) activity incongruity model – familiar versus unfamiliar family activities; and (c) location incongruity model – indoor-home, outdoor-home, community, and beyond the community. Analyses used a sample of 1502 individuals in 751 families from the U.K. Models were assessed using multi-level modelling. …

Creating Agile Organizations Through It: The Influence Of Internal It Service Perceptions On It Service Quality And It Agility, Paul Benjamin Lowry, David W. Wilson

Faculty Publications

Businesses continue to make large investments in information technology (IT) resources, and it is crucial for them to implement effective management strategies to better leverage these resources. Modern organizations are increasingly dependent on IT to remain agile and competitive in a rapidly changing market, but there remain gaps in understanding how IT resources support IT agility. Recent IT strategy research highlights the role of IT service climate in driving positive IT service quality, and we extend this work in the form of a theoretical model that relates an organization’s internal IT service perceptions to IT agility. We hypothesize a partially …

Life Satisfaction Moderates The Associations Between Motives And Excessive Social Networking Site Usage, Jin-Liang Wang, James Gaskin, Hai-Zhen Wang, Dong Liu

Faculty Publications

It has been suggested that excessive social networking sites (SNS) users might use SNS as a method of coping with their life problems and that psychosocial well-being variables might interact with users’ motives for using SNS in predicting problematic SNS use. The present research explores whether the association between motives (i.e. self-expression and passing time) and excessive SNS usage is moderated by the user’s life satisfaction. A total of 996 college students were recruited from two colleges in Chongqing China. The participants were divided into excessive and nonexcessive SNS usage groups based on their mean score from the excessive SNS …

Leveraging Multimedia To Advance Science By Disseminating A Greater Variety Of Scholarly Contributions In More Accessible Formats, James Gaskin, Paul Benjamin Lowry, David Hull

Faculty Publications

For the welfare of the scientific community, we are intentionally rocking the boat with regards to the way we conduct, recognize, and disseminate scholarly contributions. As a scientific community, we are doing ourselves a great disservice by ignoring the insights, artifacts, discoveries, and conversations which naturally occur in the scientific process of advancing knowledge, but which do not fit into the very narrowly defined form of print-style articles. By failing to recognize, reward, and publish the wide variety of scholarly contributions that are not well suited to the print-style article, we hinder scientific progress, devalue important and necessary contributions to …

Storyboarding For Invention: Layering Modes For More Effective Transfer In A Multimodal Composition Classroom, Jon Balzotti

Faculty Publications

This article describes an innovative pedagogical technique for multimodal composition courses: the use of storyboarding as an invention tool across multiple composition platforms. Student response data and our textual analysis of their multimodal texts over a two-year period reveal some challenges when new media projects are taught alongside traditional essay writing. Our research also shows that basic writing students were more likely to see similarities between the two assignments when they were asked to use a similar process of invention. Utilizing composition concepts in tandem to compose two similar but different products (essay and video) that ostensibly reside in different …

What Is Organizational History: Toward A Creative Synthesis Of History And Organization Studies, Paul C. Godfrey, John Hassard, Ellen S. O'Connor, Michael Rowlinson, Martin Ruef

Faculty Publications

As a synthesis of organization theory and historiography, the field of organizational history is mature enough to contribute to wider theoretical and historiographical debates and is sufficiently developed for a theoretical consideration of its subject matter. In this introduction to the Special Topic Forum on History and Organization Studies, we take up the question, “What is organizational history?” and consider three distinct arguments that we believe frame the next phase of development for historical work within organization studies. First, we argue that following the “historic turn,” organizational history has developed as a subfield of organization studies that takes seriously the …

Organizational Correctives For Improving Recognition Of Near-Miss Events, Robin L. Dillon, Catherine H. Tinsley, Peter M. Madsen, Edward W. Rogers

Faculty Publications

Despite decades of research on organizational disasters, such events remain too common. Scholars across a wide range of disciplines agree that one of the most viable approaches to preventing such catastrophes is to observe near-misses and use them to identify and eliminate problems before they produce large failures. Unfortunately, these important warning signals are too often ignored because they are perceived as successes rather than near-misses (or nearfailures). In this article, we explore the effect of a climate for safety on improving near-miss recognition by observers, hypothesizing that safety climate increases the level of attention that observers pay to the …

Airline Safety Improvement Through Experience With Near-Misses: A Cautionary Tale, Peter Madsen, Robin L. Dillon, Catherine H. Tinsley

Faculty Publications

In recent years, the U.S. commercial airline industry has achieved unprecedented levels of safety, with the statistical risk associated with U.S. commercial aviation falling to 0.003 fatalities per 100 million passengers. But decades of research on organizational learning show that success often breeds complacency and failure inspires improvement. With accidents as rare events, can the airline industry continue safety advancements? This question is complicated by the complex system in which the industry operates where chance combinations of multiple factors contribute to what are largely probabilistic (rather than deterministic) outcomes. Thus, some apparent successes are realized because of good fortune rather …

Scaling Up Your Story: An Experiment In Global Knowledge Sharing At The World Bank, Shad Morris, James B. Oldroyd, Sita Ramaswami

Faculty Publications

Timely and effective knowledge transfer is increasingly important in today’s technologically advanced global market. However, a myopic focus on efficiency has frequently rendered most organizational knowledge ineffective. By coupling technology with a formal system that captures informal stories in an engaging and entertaining way, actors within an organization may be more willing to listen to what geographically dispersed colleagues are doing, and may be more likely to ascribe value to that information. Focusing on the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group, we conducted interviews with those sharing and using knowledge, and performed content analyses of 175 knowledge-sharing narratives. …

Information Exploitation? A Pre-Crisis Rmbs Issuer's Private Information, Darren Aiello

Faculty Publications

This paper describes an important borrower risk factor observed privately by the issuer of non-agency RMBS. The private information available to the issuer is drawn from behavioral cues exhibited early in the life of the loan. Mortgage borrowers that make their first six payments at least a day prior to the due date are 14.8 percentage points less likely to become delinquent (equivalent to a 91-point increase in FICO score). This effect is persistent, unobservable at loan origination, and privately observed by the issuer prior to securitization. Both the credit rating agencies and the investor do not appear to be …

Limited Information And Quick Decisions: Consumer Privacy Calculus For Mobile Applications, Mark Jeffrey Keith, Jeffrey Babb, Christopher P. Furner, Amjad Abdullat, Paul Benjamin Lowry

Faculty Publications

Mobile applications (also known as “apps”) have rapidly grown into a multibillion-dollar industry. Because they are available through devices that are “always on” and often with the user, users often adopt mobile apps “on the fly” as they need them. As a result, users often base their adoption and disclosure decisions only on the information provided through the mobile app delivery platform (e.g., the Apple App Store™ or Google Play™). The fact that using a mobile app often requires one to disclose an unprecedented combination of personal information (e.g., location data, preferences, contacts, calendars, browsing history, music library) means that …