Business Commons^™

New Theories And Methods For Technology Adoption Research, Robert J. Kauffman, Angsana A. Techatassanasoontorn

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This special issue includes six articles on different aspects of technology adoption that represent the development and application of different theoretical and methodological approaches to the business problems that they treat. In terms of theory, three of the articles use behavioral and organizational theories, including adaptive structuration theory, management fashion theory, the unified theory of technology acceptance, the technology acceptance model, and diffusion of innovation theory. The other two are based on economic theory, including network effects theory, and economic growth theory. The methods used are also dramatically different in each of the studies. Three studies use field research and …

From Primordial Soup To Platform-Based Competition: Exploring The Emergence Of Products, Systems, And Platforms, C. Jason Woodard, Eric K. Clemons

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We use an agent-based NK model to explore the conditions under which standard platforms emerge among competing products. Our findings were inconclusive. We find that the usual Darwinian conditions needed for the emergence of complexity are sufficient to yield a limited reliance upon platforms with a core of common components, simply because evolution causes the population to converge on a set of products that contain combinations that "work well," yielding what we call "coincidental platform emergence." Economies of scale yield more use of common components, or "production platform emergence." Positive participation externalities initially induce the highest degree of platform emergence …

Value Relevance Of Blog Visibility, Nan Hu, Ling Liu, Arindam Tripathy, Lee J. Yao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study empirically examines the effect of a non-traditional information source, namely a firm's blog visibility on the capital market valuation of firms. After controlling for earnings, book value of equity and other value relevant variables, such as traditional media exposure, R&D spending, and advertising expense, we find a positive association between a firm's blog visibility and its capital market valuation. In addition, we find blog visibility Grange causes trading, not vice versa. Our findings indicate that non-traditional information sources such as blogs help disseminate information and influence consumers' investment decisions by capturing their attention.

Four Perspectives On Architectural Strategy, C. Jason Woodard, Joel West

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A recurring theme in the literature on technology and organizations is the concept of mirroring, which posits a duality between technological and organizational design decisions. In this paper we highlight a second, orthogonal duality between components and interfaces: designers of both products and organizations must decide what information to hide within component boundaries and what to expose to other designers. Although the component-interface duality appears in many settings, it presents especially vexing strategic challenges in the design and production of complex digital artifacts. We present a typology of four interlinked perspectives on these kinds of strategic design problems, and discuss …

Content Contribution Under Revenue Sharing And Reputation Concern In Social Media: The Case Of Youtube, Qian Tang, Bin Gu, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A key feature of social media is that it allows individuals and businesses to contribute contents for public viewing. However, little is known about how content providers derive payoffs from such activities. In this study, we build a dynamic structural model to recover the utility function for content providers. Our model distinguishes short-term payoffs based on ad revenue sharing from long-term payoffs driven by content providers’ reputation. The model was estimated using a panel data of 914 top 1000 providers and 381 randomly selected providers on YouTube from Jun 7th, 2010, to Aug 7th, 2011. The two different sets of …

Assessing The Impact Of Recommendation Agents On On-Line Consumer Unplanned Purchase Behavior, R. Eric Hostler, Victoria Y. Yoon, Zhiling Guo, Tor Guimaraes, Guisseppi Forgionne

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recommendation agents (RAs) have been used by many Internet businesses such as Amazon and Netflix. However, few authors have studied how consumer behavior is affected by those that make suggestions to online consumers based on their recent shopping behavior. Fewer still have examined the role that RAs play in influencing impulse purchasing decisions online. Our study developed a theoretical model to illustrate the impact of RAs on online consumer behavior. The model was tested through an online shopping simulation which used a collaborative filtering based product RA. Particular attention was paid to the effects of an RA on consumer behavior; …

Information Technology For Service Innovation: The Impact On Business Productivity And Channel Disruption From Cloud Computing And Smart Device Computing, Insoo Son

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The advancement of IT has brought great deal of impact to both businesses and individuals such as increased business productivity and new type of digital communications and entertainment. Yet, IT is still in need of developing itself to enable firms’ requirement of enhancing business competence and satisfy customers’ growing expectations for new IT products and services. In line with the situation, there have been two emerging IT innovations that take more evolutionary features for both business and individual computing. For business computing, the concept of cloud computing has recently emerged and become commercialized to meet firms’ budget constraint and improve …

Agile Innovation Management, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The volume and velocity of innovations are on the increase resulting in increased pressures on every company for attaining, retaining and increasing its market leadership. Many companies need to retool their innovation management processes to address two agility related objectives in order to survive and grow in such a rapidly changing innovation environment. The first objective would be the ability to assemble an innovation team within the shortest possible time. This can only be satisfied by companies that are capable of forming innovation teams rather quickly. The related second objective would be to reduce the I2M (Idea to Market) cycle …

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 …

Managing Successive Generation Product Diffusion In The Presence Of Strategic Consumers, Zhiling Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Frequent new product release and technological uncertainty about the release time pose significant challenges for firms to manage successive generation of products. On the one hand, strategic consumers may delay their purchase decision and substitute the earlier generation with the newer generation product. On the other hand, the firm must fully anticipate consumer reactions and take into account the effect of their strategic behavior on product pricing and successive generation product diffusion. This paper proposes a prediction market to forecast new product release. We show that the market information aggregation mechanism can improve forecast accuracy of new product launch. Better …

Profit-Maximizing Firm Investments In Customer Information Security, Yong Yick Lee, Robert J. Kauffman, Ryan Sougstad

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

When a customer interacts with a firm, extensive personal information often is gathered without the individual's knowledge. Significant risks are associated with handling this kind of information. Providing protection may reduce the risk of the loss and misuse of private information, but it imposes some costs on both the firm and its customers. Nevertheless, customer information security breaches still may occur. They have several distinguishing characteristics: (1) typically it is hard to quantify monetary damages related to them; (2) customer information security breaches may be caused by intentional attacks, as well as through unintentional organizational and customer behaviors; and (3) …

Price Points And Price Rigidity, Daniel Levy, Dongwon Lee, Haipeng (Allen) Lee, Robert J. Kauffman, Mark Bergen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study the link between price points and price rigidity using two data sets: weekly scanner data and Internet data. We find that ‘‘9’’ is the most frequent ending for the penny, dime, dollar, and ten-dollar digits; the most common price changes are those that keep the price endings at ‘‘9’’; 9-ending prices are less likely to change than non-9-ending prices; and the average size of price change is larger for 9-ending than non-9- ending prices. We conclude that 9-ending contributes to price rigidity from penny to dollar digits and across a wide range of product categories, retail formats, and …

Strategic Responses To Standardization: Embrace, Extend Or Extinguish?, C. Jason Woodard, Joel West

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prior research on technology standardization has focused on two common patterns: processes in which product developers and other stakeholders cooperate to achieve a consensus outcome, and “standards wars” in which competing technologies vie for dominance in the market. This study examines Microsoft's responses to 12 software technologies in the period between 1990 and 2005. Despite the company's reputed tendency to pursue a strategy dubbed “embrace, extend, and extinguish,” a content analysis of news articles from the same period reveals surprising diversity in Microsoft's responses at the product level.

We classify these responses using a typology that treats “embrace” and “extend” …

The Impact Of Ifrs On Accounting Quality In A Regulated Market: An Empirical Study Of China, Chunhui Liu, Lee J. Yao, Nan Hu, Ling Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As more countries consider the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) that are based on practices prevalent in the English-speaking countries with free markets, it’s increasingly important to understand the impact of IFRS on countries of different institutional, economic, and political environments. This article reports a study that examines the impact of IFRS on accounting quality in a regulated market, China, where new substantially IFRS-convergent accounting standards became mandatory for listed firms in 2007. Accounting quality is examined for the period 2005 to 2008 with only firms mandated to follow the new standards. The empirical results generally indicate that …

Measuring An Organisation’S Innovation Climate: A Case Study From Singapore, Siu Loon Hoe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Purpose: The article aims to discuss the six key factors that were proposed and included in the design of a customized innovation climate questionnaire. Design/methodology/approach: The implementation case study of an innovation climate survey for a Singapore‐based real estate group is presented. In particular, the design of the questionnaire and selection of key factors to be measured are discussed. Findings: While not a “rigorous” instrument in the academic sense, the article can guide managers and organization development professionals to better gauge an organization's innovation climate and deepen the understanding of innovation culture. Originality/value: This article contributes to the existing innovation …

Allocating Resources In Multiagent Flowshops With Adaptive Auctions, Hoong Chuin Lau, Zhengyi Zhao, Sam Shuzhi Ge, Thong Heng Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we consider the problem of allocating machine resources among multiple agents, each of which is responsible to solve a flowshop scheduling problem. We present an iterated combinatorial auction mechanism in which bid generation is performed within each agent, while a price adjustment procedure is performed by a centralized auctioneer. While this approach is fairly well-studied in the literature, our primary innovation is in an adaptive price adjustment procedure, utilizing variable step-size inspired by adaptive PID-control theory coupled with utility pricing inspired by classical microeconomics. We compare with the conventional price adjustment scheme proposed in Fisher (1985), and …

Taxisim: A Multiagent Simulation Platform For Evaluating Taxi Fleet Operations, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thi Duong Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Taxi service is an important mode of public transportation in most metropolitan areas since it provides door-to-door convenience in the public domain. Unfortunately, despite all the convenience taxis bring, taxi fleets are also extremely inefficient to the point that over 50% of its operation time could be spent in idling state. Improving taxi fleet operation is an extremely challenging problem, not just because of its scale, but also due to fact that taxi drivers are self-interested agents that cannot be controlled centrally. To facilitate the study of such complex and decentralized system, we propose to construct a multiagent simulation platform …

A Quality Metric For Sustainable Innovations, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sustainability has become a major concern for nations and firms especially since the Kyoto Protocol was defined in 1997. While there have been several studies on benchmarks for national innovation systems and effectiveness of innovation management within firms there is as yet no reasonable metric for determining the quality of an innovation much less its quality relating to sustainability? Similarly, there have been several studies on sustainability but that such research groups have also not focused on developing a metric for denoting the quality of sustainable innovations. This paper offers a metric that defines the quality of an innovation, especially …

Cio Reporting Structure, Strategic Positioning, And Firm Performance, Rajiv D Banker, Nan Hu, Paul A Pavlou, Jerry Luftman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Almost 30 years after the introduction of the CIO position, the ideal CIO reporting structure (whether the CIO should report to the CEO or the CFO) is yet to be identified. There is an intuitive assumption among some proponents of IT that the CIO should always report to the CEO to promote the importance of IT and the CIO's clout in the firm, while some adversaries of IT call for a CIO—CFO reporting structure to keep a tab on IT spending. However, we challenge these two ad hoc prescriptions by arguing that neither CIO reporting structure is necessarily optimal, and …

Decentralized Decision Support For An Agent Population In Dynamic And Uncertain Domains, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thi Duong Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research is motivated by problems in urban transportation and labor mobility, where the agent flow is dynamic, non-deterministic and on a large scale. In such domains, even though the individual agents do not have an identity of their own and do not explicitly impact other agents, they have implicit interactions with other agents. While there has been much research in handling such implicit effects, it has primarily assumed controlled movements of agents in static environments. We address the issue of decision support for individual agents having involuntary movements in dynamic environments . For instance, in a taxi fleet serving …

Incremental Dcop Search Algorithms For Solving Dynamic Dcop Problems, William Yeoh, Pradeep Varakantham, Xiaoxun Sun, Sven Koenig

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs) are well-suited for modeling multi-agent coordination problems. However, most research has focused on developing algorithms for solving static DCOPs. In this paper, we model dynamic DCOPs as sequences of (static) DCOPs with changes from one DCOP to the next one in the sequence. We introduce the ReuseBounds procedure, which can be used by any-space ADOPT and any-space BnB-ADOPT to find cost-minimal solutions for all DCOPs in the sequence faster than by solving each DCOP individually. This procedure allows those agents that are guaranteed to remain unaffected by a change to reuse their lower and upper …

Leveraging Complex Event Processing For Smart Hospitals Using Rfid, Wen Yao, Chao-Hsien Chu, Zang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

RFID technology has been examined in healthcare to support a variety of applications such as patient identification and monitoring, asset tracking, and patient–drug compliance. However, managing the large volume of RFID data and understanding them in the medical context present new challenges. One effective solution for dealing with these challenges is complex event processing (CEP), which can extract meaningful events for context-aware applications. In this paper, we propose a CEP framework to model surgical events and critical situations in an RFID-enabled hospital. We have implemented a prototype system with the proposed approach for surgical management and conducted performance evaluations to …

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 …

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, …

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 …

Action Learning: Reflections Of A First-Time Coach, Siu Loon Hoe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

PurposeIn recent years, action learning has been widely adopted as a problem solving and leadership development tool. The purpose of the article is to reflect on key learning points when initiating action learning sessions and provide tips on what to expect from such sessions.Design/methodology/approachDocumentation of the author's initial first‐hand action learning coaching experience and sharing of lessons learnt in organizing and coaching action learning sessions.FindingsThe paper offers a view on how action learning practitioners can overcome initial coaching issues to run more effective sessions.Originality/valueThis article contributes to the existing action learning literature by providing a deeper understanding of key factors …

How Information Management Capability Influences Firm Performance, Sunil Mithas, Narayan Ramasubbu, V. Sambamurthy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

How do information technology capabilities contribute to firm performance? This study develops a conceptual model linking IT-enabled information management capability with three important organizational capabilities (customer management capability, process management capability, and performance management capability). We argue that these three capabilities mediate the relationship between information management capability and firm performance. To test our conceptual model, we use a rare archival data set that contains actual scores from multidimensional and high-quality assessments of firms and intraorganizational units of a conglomerate business group that had adopted a model of performance excellence for organizational transformation based on the Baldrige criteria. This research …

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 …

Manipulation In Digital Word-Of-Mouth: A Reality Check For Book Reviews, Nan Hu, Indranil Bose, Yunjun Gao, Ling Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Built upon the discretionary accrual-based earnings management framework, our paper develops a discretionary manipulation proxy to study the management of online reviews. We reveal that fraudulent review manipulation is a serious problem for 1) non-bestseller books; 2) books whose reviews are classified as not very helpful; 3) books that experience greater variability in the helpfulness of their online reviews; and 4) popular books as well as high-priced books. We also show that review management decreases with the passage of time. Just like fraudulent earnings management, manipulated online reviews reflect inauthentic information from which consumers might derive wrong valuation especially for …

Innovation And Price Competition In A Two-Sided Market, Mei Lin, Shaojin Li, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We examine a platform's optimal two-sided pricing strategy while considering seller-side innovation decisions and price competition. We model the innovation race among sellers in both finite and infinite horizons. In the finite case, we analytically show that the platform's optimal seller-side access fee fully extracts the sellers' surplus, and that the optimal buyer-side access fee mitigates price competition among sellers. The platform's optimal strategy may be to charge or subsidize buyers depending on the degree of variation in the buyers' willingness to pay for quality; this optimal strategy induces full participation on both sides. Furthermore, a wider quality gap among …