Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Robust Optimization For Tree-Structured Stochastic Network Design, Xiaojian Wu, Akshat Kumar, Daniel Sheldon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stochastic network design is a general framework for optimizing network connectivity. It has several applications in computational sustainability including spatial conservation planning, pre-disaster network preparation, and river network optimization. A common assumption in previous work has been made that network parameters (e.g., probability of species colonization) are precisely known, which is unrealistic in real- world settings. We therefore address the robust river network design problem where the goal is to optimize river connectivity for fish movement by removing barriers. We assume that fish passability probabilities are known only imprecisely, but are within some interval bounds. We then develop a planning …

Walking Firms Through It Decisions, Singapore Management University

Research@SMU: Connecting the Dots

Is it better to be an early adopter or wait till the technology matures? Professor Ma Dan helps companies make data-driven decisions.

See the papers:

• The pricing strategy analysis for the Software-as-a-Service business model
• Cloud services from a consumer perspective.

Technology Mergers And Acquisitions In The Presence Of An Installed Base: A Strategic Analysis, Qiu-Hong Wang, Kai-Lung Hui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study the strategic benefits of M&A when competing IT vendors sell different generations of the same product with different quality. We assume the new product arrives unexpectedly when an installed base of old product exists. We show that the combination of consumers' purchase history and heterogeneity leads to new demand complexity that gives rise to innovative product strategies. We find that shelving the old product is an important motivation for M&A. The acquirer may exercise static or intertemporal price discrimination depending on whether it can exercise upgrade pricing. M&A may speed up or slow down new product consumption, and …

Experience Me! The Impact Of Content Sampling Strategies On The Marketing Of Digital Entertainment Goods, Ai Phuong Hoang, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Product sampling allows consumers to try out a small portion of a product for free. Uncertainty associated with consumption of information goods makes sampling useful for digital entertainment providers. Firms offer some programming for free to attract consumers to purchase a series of programs. We explore the effectiveness of content sampling for information goods using a dataset containing more than 17 million free previews and purchase observations on households from a digital entertainment firm that offers video-on-demand (VoD). Based on theories related to product sampling and information goods, we analyze the relationship between free previews and VoD purchases for series …

Endogenous Network Effects, Platform Pricing And Market Liquidity, Mei Lin, Ruhai Wu, Wen Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper examines a monopoly platform's two-sided pricing strategies in a setting with seller competition, which gives rise to not only positive cross-side network effects between buyers and sellers, but also a negative same-side network effect among sellers. We show that platform pricing depends crucially on the characteristics associated with market liquidity, which contrasts with the previous studies that point to the two sides' relative demand elasticities and/or network effects. A market is said to be more liquid when it has less friction, resulting in a larger total surplus for the platform economy and hence greater equilibrium entry on both …

Competition, Cooperation And Regulation: Understanding The Evolution Of The Mobile Payments Technology Ecosystem, Jun Liu, Robert J. Kauffman, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The past twenty years have been a time of many new technological developments, changing business practices, and interesting innovations in the financial information system (IS) and technology landscape. They have led to the increasing use of prior innovations that have supported e-commerce, and that are now being brought into financial services to support different kinds of improvements to core business processes. This research examines recent changes in the payment sector in financial services, specifically related to mobile payments (m-payments) that enable new channels for consumer payments for goods and services purchases, and other forms of economic exchange. We extend recent …

Near Real-Time Retail Payment And Settlement Systems Mechanism Design, Zhiling Guo, Robert John Kauffman, Mei Lin, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rapid expansion of e-commerce, along with rising domestic and cross-border payments, has fueled the demand among financial institutions for a cost-effective means to expedite clearing and settlement of low-value retail payments. These are called faster payments settlement systems. Traditionally, retail payments have made extensive use of interbank netting systems, in which payments are accumulated for end-of-day settlement. This approach, known as deferred net settlement (DNS), reduces the liquidity needs of the payment system, but bears inherent operational and financial risks for unsettled intraday payments. As large dollar volumes of retail payments accumulate, real-time gross settlement (RTGS) has been recognized as …

Evaluation And Improvement Of Procurement Process With Data Analytics, Melvin H. C. Tan, Wee Leong Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Analytics can be applied in procurement to benefit organizations beyond just prevention and detection of fraud. This study aims to demonstrate how advanced data mining techniques such as text mining and cluster analysis can be used to improve visibility of procurement patterns and provide decision-makers with insight to develop more efficient sourcing strategies, in terms of cost and effort. A case study of an organization’s effort to improve its procurement process is presented in this paper. The findings from this study suggest that opportunities exist for organizations to aggregate common goods and services among the purchases made under and across …

Production Cost Heterogeneity In A Circular-City Model, Mei Lin, Ruhai Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We derive the closed-form solution characterizing the equilibrium in a circular-city model with competing firms of heterogeneous production costs. Tractability issues in this setting are well known and have not been resolved in prior work. In this paper, the equilibrium solution illustrates effects of production costs on firms’ strategic decisions, their aggregate profit, and consumer surplus.

Technology Investment Decision-Making Under Uncertainty, Robert J. Kauffman, Jun Liu, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Innovations involving information technology (IT) provide potentially valuable investment opportunities for industry and government organizations. Significant uncertainties are associated with decision-making for IT investment though, a problem that senior executives have been concerned about for a long time. The uncertainties include consumer, market and regulatory responses, IT-driven changes in operational and transactional performance, technology standards and competition, and future market conditions. All these things have an impact on organizations’ willingness to adopt. As a result, traditional capital budgeting, investment experience, and intuition have not been very effective in IT investment decision-making. We propose a new option-based stochastic valuation modeling approach …

Managing Technical Debt: Insights From Recent Empirical Evidence, Narayan Ramasubbu, Chris F. Kemerer, C. Jason Woodard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Technical debt refers to maintenance obligations that software teams accumulate as a result of their actions. Empirical research has led researchers to suggest three dimensions along which software development teams should map their technical-debt metrics: customer satisfaction needs, reliability needs, and the probability of technology disruption.

A Conceptual Model To Evaluate Decisions For Service Profitability, Eng Lieh Ouh, Stan Jarzabek

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Service profitability depends on the cost of engineering a service for a given base of tenants, on service provisioning cost, and on the revenue gained from selling the service to that tenant base. The tenant base depends on the range of service variability, i.e., on Service Provider's ability to vary service requirements to meet tenant expectations. These various factors that have to do with service profitability form a complex web of information that makes it difficult to analyze and see the exact impact of decisions regarding the choice of service architecture or the use of service adaptation techniques. To make …

Mechanism Design For Near Real-Time Retail Payment And Settlement Systems, Zhiling Guo, Robert John Kauffman, Mei Lin, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

have made extensive use of interbank netting systems, in which payments are accumulated for end-of-day settlement. This approach, known as deferred net settlement (DNS), reduces the liquidity needs of a payment system, but bears inherent operational risks. As large dollar volumes of retail payments accumulate swiftly, real-time gross settlement (RTGS) is an attractive option. It permits immediate settlement of transactions during the day, but it brings up other risks that require consideration. We propose a hybrid payment management system involving elements of both DNS and RTGS. We explore several hybrid system mechanism designs to allow payment prioritization, reduce payment delays, …

Recovering Household Preferences For Digital Entertainment, Jin Li, Zhiling Guo, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cable TV return path data made possible by current generation set-top boxes present a new opportunity to analyze household viewing behavior and recover household viewing preferences from it. This research develops a model of household viewing preference that supports quantifying a household's valuation for different categories of digital content within the constraints of the programs to which it subscribes. This study uses a data set of more than 1 million observations on households from a digital entertainment firm that offers basic and premium services. Our estimation is via a Bayesian hierarchical model that employs the Gibbs sampler. The results show …

Improving Internet Security Through Mandatory Information Disclosure, Qian Tang, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although disclosure has long been considered as a solution to internalize externalities, mandatory security information disclosure is still in debate. We propose a mandatory disclosure mechanism based on existing data. The information is disclosed as straightforward rankings of organizations for users to understand, interpret, and make comparisons. As a result, the disclosure can influence organizations through reputational effects. We created a public website to disclose information regularly and conducted a quasi-experiment on outgoing spam to test the effectiveness of our mechanism on four matched country groups. For each treated country, we released the ranking list of top 10 most spamming …

Special Section: Economics, Electronic Commerce, And Competitive Strategy, Eric K. Clemons, Rajiv M. Dewan, Robert John Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The title of this year;s special section of selected papers, whose initial versionswere presented at the “Economics and Electronic Commerce,” and “Information Technologyand Competitive Strategy” mini-tracks of the 2001 Hawaii International Conferenceon Systems Science (HICSS), reflects the increasing convergence of ideas fromEconomics and Information Systems (IS) research. This convergence has been occurringover the last several years and is related to the developments in e-commerce. ISresearch has been rapidly coming of age, driven by the ever-increasing importance ofinformation technology (IT) in the marketplace, and the need for managers, investors,policy-makers, and the public to understand how to more effectively navigate in ourhighly …

A Metrics Suite Of Cloud Computing Adoption Readiness, Robert J. Kauffman, Dan Ma, Martin Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent research on cloud computing adoption indicates that there has been a lack of deep understanding of its benefits by managers and organizations. This has been an obstacle for adoption. We report on an initial design for a firm-level cloud computing readiness metrics suite. We propose categories and measures to form a set of metrics to measure adoption readiness and assess the required adjustments in strategy and management, technology and operations, and business policies. We reviewed the relevant interdisciplinary literature and interviewed industry professionals to ground our metrics based on theory and practice knowledge. We identified four relevant categories for …

Platform Pricing With Endogenous Network Effects, Mei Lin, Ruhai Wu, Wen Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper examines a monopoly platform’s two-sided pricing strategy through modeling the trades between the participating sellers and buyers. In this approach, the network effects emerge endogenously through the equilibrium trading strategies of the two sides. We show that platform pricing depends crucially on the characteristics associated with market liquidity, including both sides’ entry costs, the buyers’ preferences, and the distribution of the sellers’ quality. The platform may subsidize sellers if the market is sufficiently liquid, whereas buyer subsidy can be optimal given an illiquid market. We also illustrate the impact of the sellers’ quality heterogeneity on the platform’s optimal …

Managing Seller Heterogeneity In A Competitive Marketplace, R. Wu, Mei Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The growth of online marketplaces is accompanied by significant heterogeneity of the third-party sellers. The marketplace owner often applies policies that favor the sellers who offer higher values to buyers, which puts the lower-value sellers at an even greater disadvantage. This leads to the phenomenon of Matthew Effect. Our study focuses on a marketplace owner’s policy in managing seller heterogeneity and analyzes Matthew Effect in a competitive market environment. By extending the circular city model, we analytically examine the price competition among a large number of sellers that differ both in variety and in their value offerings. We present the …

An Ecological Model For Digital Platforms Maintenance And Evolution, Paolo Rocchi, Paolo Spagnoletti, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The maintenance of software products has been studied extensively in both software engineering and management information systems. Such studies are mainly focused on the activities that take place prior to starting the maintenance phase. Their contribution is either related to the improvement of software quality or to validating contingency models for reducing maintenance efforts. The continuous maintenance philosophy suggests to shift the attention within the maintenance phase for better coping with the evolutionary trajectories of digital platforms. In this paper, we examine the maintenance process of a digital platform from the perspective of the software vendor. Based on our empirical …

Exploring Variety Seeking Behavior In Mobile Users, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Robert J. Kauffman, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding the personality traits and current attitudes of individual consumers is crucial for retailers and mobile advertisers. In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon of “variety seeking tendencies" in mobile users in their (1) online (represented by their App usage behavior), and (2) physical (represented by their location visits) worlds. We show that different categories of users exhibit different levels of variety. Further, by analyzing at various time scales, we show that there exists correlation between when a person is likely to visit new places in the real world and when he/she is likely to explore new Apps in the …

Near-Optimal Nonmyopic Contact Center Planning Using Dual Decomposition, Akshat Kumar, Sudhanshu Singh, Pranav Gupta, Gyana Parija

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address the problem of minimizing staffing cost in a contact center subject to service level requirements over multiple weeks. We handle both the capacity planning and agent schedule generation aspect of this problem. Our work incorporates two unique business requirements. First, we develop techniques that can provide near-optimal staffing for 247 contact centers over long term, upto eight weeks, rather than planning myopically on a week-on-week basis. Second, our approach is usable in an online interactive setting in which staffing managers using our system expect high quality plans within a short time period. Results on large real world and …

A Retail Bank's Bpm Experience, Shankararaman, Venky, Gottipati Swapna, Randall E. Duran

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This real-life case study, which was undertaken by a leading financial services group in the Asia-Pacific region, is used to demonstrate the innovative use of BPM (Business Process Management) technology in a competitive business area. It describes how a BPM project, within the Application Verification and Capture (AVC), was conceived, designed and implemented in order to deliver strategic value to the organization. Hereafter, the financial services group will be referred to as “the bank”. The AVC project was targeted at one of the bank's processes called the Application Verification and Capture (AVC) process for unit trust products. This process involved …

Paths Of Influence For Innovations In Financial Is And Technology Ecosystems, Jun Liu, Robert John Kauffman, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Predicting technological innovations in financial information systems (IS) and technology ecosystems has been challenging for technology forecasters and industry analysts due to their underlying complexity. Technology-based financial innovations over the past four decades, such as programmed trading in the 1980s, risk-adjusted return on capital-based financial risk management systems in the 1990s, high-frequency trading and Internet banking in 2000s, and now mobile payments in the 2010s, have all led to transformations in the financial services industry. What basis can be identified to predict such new innovations? And what areas of financial services will they affect? This study applies the technology ecosystem …

Does Latitude Hurt While Longitude Kills? Geographical And Temporal Separation In A Large Scale Software Development Project, Patrick Wagstrom, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed software development allows firms to leverage cost advantages and place work near centers of competency. This distribution comes at a cost -- distributed teams face challenges from differing cultures, skill levels, and a lack of shared working hours. In this paper we examine whether and how geographic and temporal separation in a large scale distributed software development influences developer interactions. We mine the work item trackers for a large commercial software project with a globally distributed development team. We examine both the time to respond and the propensity of individuals to respond and find that when taken together, geographic …

Canaries In The Urban Data Mine: Analytics For Smarter City Life, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Technology-based sensors and data analytics have created unprecendented levels of informedness for consumers, corporations, the public and government agencies. The information they generated provides a basis for smarter cities and more sustainable urban living.

How Can Substitution And Complementarity Effects Be Leveraged For Broadband Internet Services Strategy?, Gwangjae Jung, Young Soo Kim, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With growth in mobile Internet services, the relationship between mobile and fixed broadband has become an issue in telecom firm strategy. Previous research focused on aggregate penetration for mobile and fixed broadband services. Our research analyzes the economic relationship between mobile and fixed broadband services at the household level, as a basis for how senior managers should rethink their strategy approach. Using data on broadband services subscriptions, we examine how changes that occur for mobile broadband services bandwidth (MBB) affect changes in fixed broadband bandwidth (FBB) services subscriptions, inclusive of new subscriptions - and vice versa. We explore the different …

Mini-Track Introduction: Information Economics, Competition, Regulation, Law And Society, Eric K. Clemons, Robert John Kauffman, Thomas A. Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This mini-track is informed by the most modern thinking in information economics and competitive strategy, and includes many interdisciplinary applications of IS and technology.

A Local Social Network Approach For Research Management, Xiaoyan Liu, Zhiling Guo, Zhenjiang Lin, Jian Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional methods to evaluate research performance focus on citation count, quality and quantity of research output by individual researchers. These measures overlook the roles an individual plays in research collaboration, which is critical in an institutional research management environment due to the inherent interdependency among research entities. In order to address the organizational research management needs, we propose a research social network approach to better analyze local collaboration networks. For this purpose, we develop a new “collaboration supportiveness” measure to quantify an individual researcher's collaboration ability. Insights derived from this research are very helpful for managers to effectively allocate resources, …

Assessing The Moderating Effect Of Consumer Product Knowledge And Online Shopping Experience On Using Recommedation Agents For Customer Loyalty, Victoria Y. Yoon, R. Eric Hostler, Zhiling Guo, Tor Guimaraes

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media technologies have greatly facilitated the creation of many types of user-generated information, e.g., product rating information can be used to generate preference-based recommendation. As a decision support tool, a Recommendation Agent (RA) has been widely adopted by many e-commerce websites. The impact of RAs on online shopping has been extensively examined in the IS literature. However, from Marketing and Social Media perspectives, the widely adopted cognitive–affect–conative–action framework of customer loyalty has not been tested in the presence of RAs. Moreover, there has been little research assessing the impact of increasing consumer knowledge about specific product domains on customer …