Attention Adjustment, Renewal, and Equilibrium Seeking in Online Search: An Eye-Tracking Approach - Ahn, Jae-Hyeon; Bae, Yoon-Soo; Ju, Jaehyeon; Oh, Wonseok (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2018)
Using eye-tracking field experiments, we examine the dynamics underlying consumers’ attention-allocation behaviors in online search, with focus on attention adjustment, attention renewal, and equilibrium seeking. In particular, we probed into how consumers’ e-commerce search behaviors vary when they are exposed to an advertisement during a search and when they are not. The findings from the two separate experiments suggest that consumers’ attention span decreases exponentially, instead of linearly, as they maneuver from the top to the bottom of a search result webpage. The total number of available options significantly influences the speed and pattern of attention decay. However, attention decay does not simply move in the direction of depletion but can be refreshed and renewed upon encountering attention-diverting ad stimuli. Although ad stimuli are often considered distracting and worthless, they can produce positive effects when positioned in the middle of a search results listing, where a consumer’s attention resources are rejuvenated by ads. Finally, because of consumers’ propensity to seek equilibrium, attention decay occurs more rapidly after, rather than before, attention renewal. We extend the literature on the mere categorization effect by investigating how ad stimuli structurally separate search choices into mental categories and diminish on-going attention decay patterns.
Keywords: attention allocation; visual attention; attention decay; attention renewal; eye-tracking; excessive product choice; e-commerce; consumer attention; online search

Impact of User-Generated Internet Content on Hospital Reputational Dynamics - Ivanov, Anton; Sharman, Raj (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2018)
In pursuit of notable reputations, organizations commonly engage their stakeholders using various online mechanisms. While “reputation signaling” via online user engagement is commonplace, its implications in the context of user-generated content (UGC) remain largely unaddressed. This study empirically explores the impact of UGC on hospital reputational dynamics. A unique panel dataset was analyzed using a lagged model approach to determine the effects of signals of quality, awareness, and content variance on hospital prominence and quality as well as the impact of reputation on financial performance. The findings suggest that quality signals significantly impact patient-perceived quality ratings, and signals of awareness and content variance significantly impact prominence rating. Also, in contrast to prominence, perceived quality significantly and negatively impactsfinancial performance. Given the ready availability of user-generated feedback, these findings can inform patient-provider online engagement strategies and related budget allocations. Furthermore, they highlight the unique role of Facebook ratings as an antecedent to quality and prominence dimensions of reputation.
Keywords: hospital reputation; healthcare; online prominence; quality signals; content variance; user-generated content; hospital utilization; financial performance; online engagement

Using Perspective-Taking to De-escalate Launch Date Commitment for Products with Known Software Defects - Lee, Hyung Koo; Lee, Jong Seok; Keil, Mark (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2018)
Previous research in software product development used the lens of escalation of commitment to study the problem of adhering to original product launch dates and suggested that decisions related to launching new products can be particularly prone to escalation of commitment because they involve a high level of uncertainty and large financial stakes. In this study, we propose perspective-taking as a de-escalation tactic to reduce product managers’ commitment to the original product launch date when faced with severe software defects. In two laboratory experiments, we found that when participants took the perspective of product users who might be negatively affected by the launch of a defective software product, their commitment de-escalated more than when they took a shareholder’s perspective. We also found that anticipated guilt about launching the product as scheduled mediated the relationship between perspective-taking and de-escalation. In addition, one of the experiments involved severe consequences associated with the software defects; in that case, we found that the mediation effect of anticipated guilt was moderated by the product managers’ customer orientation. This study makes a theoretical contribution to the literature of de-escalation of commitment by proposing perspective-taking as a new de-escalation tactic, and by demonstrating the affect-based mechanism of perspective-taking that operates through anticipated guilt. While practitioners may use perspective-taking as an effective tactic in reducing commitment to launching a defective software product, our findings highlight the importance of selecting the appropriate target perspective.
Keywords: new product development; software defects; software launch; product launch decision; de-escalation of commitment; perspective-taking; customer orientation

Effect of “Following” on Contributions to Open Source Communities - Moqri, Mahdi; Mei, Xiaowei; Qiu, Liangfei; Bandyopadhyay, Subhajyoti (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2018)
In this study, we estimate the effect of “online following,” a basic form of online social interaction, on members’ contributions in open source software (OSS) communities, using a unique longitudinal data set containing information on over 4 million OSS developers and their social interactions over 7 years. We find that obtaining new followers in the previous month has a significant positive effect on developers’ level of contribution in the current month. The effect carries over to the next month although the marginal effect decreases. We further find that the effect of new followers on their contribution level is much stronger for freelancers than those with company affiliation. In contrast to the previous literature that posited the existence of non-monetary incentives for developers who contribute to the OSS communities, our result suggests the existence of incentives that are tied to future monetary rewards for developers on these platforms. Our findings have important implications for the OSS platforms as well as the OSS community. OSS platform designers may consult our results to learn about the social features that affect members’ contribution. We also encourage OSS community to use the “following” feature more prominently on OSS platforms to incentivize higher contribution levels to the projects.
Keywords: : open source software; OSS; open source communities; online communities; social interaction; online following; contributor motivations

Fostering Participant Health Knowledge and Attitudes: An Econometric Study of a Chronic Disease-Focused Online Health Community - Chen, Langtao; Baird, Aaron; Straub, Detmar (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Health consumers are increasingly participating in consumer-to-consumer (C2C) online health communities (OHCs) to receive health-related support and to provide assistance and support to others. However, questions remain as to how individual OHC participants are affected by the relationships they have established within an OHC and how the content exchanged between OHC participants impacts individual-level health knowledge and attitudes. To address these open questions, we develop a model that integrates participant network position (i.e., structural social capital) in an OHC, informational and emotional support exchange, and downstream individual-level health knowledge and attitudes. Based on a panel dataset collected from nine chronic disease-focused discussion boards within an OHC platform, we find that structural social capital is indeed a significant antecedent to social support exchange within an OHC and, interestingly, that social support provisioning (i.e., proactively aiding others) has a stronger effect than social support receipt on health literacy and health attitude improvement.
Keywords: online health communities; chronic disease; structural social capital; social support exchange; health knowledge; health literacy; health attitudes; machine learning; social network analysis

Nuanced Responses to Enterprise Architecture Management: Loyalty, Voice, and Exit - Hylving, Lena; Bygstad, Bendik (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) aims to deal with the complexities of information technology (IT) solutions and to achieve more organizational agility. EAM is a holistic approach to IT architecture, but the results of the approach have been variable. An under-researched aspect of EAM is how different organizational units respond to the call for a holistic approach. In this study, we investigate how different stakeholders in a large governmental agency connected to three on-going projects and their response to EAM initiatives. With a qualitative approach, we identify three options of response to EAM initiatives: (1) active compliance with the EAM strategy, (2) loyal but passive response, and (3) rebel solutions. We argue for the need of a more nuanced repertoire of actions for dealing with EAM and show how these responses are useful for understanding and managing successful EAM.
Keywords: Enterprise Architecture Management; IT architecture; organizational agility

Regulating Cryptocurrencies: A Supervised Machine Learning Approach to De-Anonymizing the Bitcoin Blockchain - Yin, Hao Hua Sun; Langenheldt, Klaus; Harlev, Mikkel; Mukkamala, Raghava Rao; Vatrapu, Ravi (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency whose transactions are recorded on a distributed, openly accessible ledger. On the Bitcoin Blockchain, an owning entity’s real-world identity is hidden behind a pseudonym, a so-called address. Therefore, Bitcoin is widely assumed to provide a high degree of anonymity, which is a driver for its frequent use for illicit activities. This paper presents a novel approach for de-anonymizing the Bitcoin Blockchain by using Supervised Machine Learning to predict the type of yet-unidentified entities. We utilized a sample of 957 entities (with ≈385 million transactions), whose identity and type had been revealed, as training set data and built classifiers differentiating among 12 categories. Our main finding is that we can indeed predict the type of a yet-unidentified entity. Using the Gradient Boosting algorithm with default parameters, we achieve a mean cross-validation accuracy of 80.42% and F1-score of ≈79.64%. We show two examples, one where we predict on a set of 22 clusters that are suspected to be related to cybercriminal activities, and another where we classify 153,293 clusters to provide an estimation of the activity on the Bitcoin ecosystem. We discuss the potential applications of our method for organizational regulation and compliance, societal implications, outline study limitations, and propose future research directions. A prototype implementation of our method for organizational use is included in the appendix.
Keywords: cryptocurrencies; bitcoin; blockchain; cybersecurity; supervised machine learning; online anonymity; cybercrime

A Program of Collaboration Engineering Research and Practice: Contributions, Insights, and Future Directions - De Vreede, Gert-Jan; Briggs, Robert O (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Collaboration Engineering (CE) is an approach for the design and deployment of repeatable collaborative work practices that can be executed by domain experts without the ongoing support of external collaboration professionals. Since 2001, CE has been an active and productive topic of research that has attracted scientists from different backgrounds and disciplines. CE research started with studies on ways to transfer professional collaboration expertise to novices using a pattern language called thinkLets. Subsequent research focused on the development of theories to explain key phenomena, the development of a structured design methodology, training methods, technology support, design theories, and various field and experimental studies focusing on specific aspects of the CE approach. This paper details the contributions from CE research and practice based on a literature assessment of 331 publications. It extracts the key insights from the body of CE research thus far, identifies significant areas of inquiry that have not yet been explored, and looks ahead at the CE research opportunities that are emerging as our society, organizations, technologies, and the nature of collaboration evolve.
Keywords: collaboration engineering; collaboration; thinkLets; patterns of collaboration; online collaboration

A Risk Mitigation Framework for Information Technology Projects: A Cultural Contingency Perspective - Maruping, Likoebe M; Venkatesh, Viswanath; Thong, James Y L; Zhang, Xiaojun (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
As new information technology (IT) platforms continue to emerge, the technical project risk associated with developing IT projects for these platforms is particularly challenging for organizations. We develop a nomological network of people, process, and technology to gain insight into how the effect of technical project risk can be mitigated at the IT project team level. Drawing on cultural contingency theory, the IT project risk framework, and the IT project management literature, we elaborate on the IT project team composition and team processes necessary to mitigate technical project risk. We tested the nomological network by conducting a field study of 325 IT project teams over a 3-year period at a large corporation in China. We found that project risk mitigation processes mediated the effect of IT project teams’ cultural composition on IT project performance, and the effect of these processes on IT project performance was stronger under high levels of technical project risk compared to low levels of such risk. By incorporating the cultural contingency theory into developing a nomological network of technical risk mitigation processes, this work not only contributes to the IT project management literature, but also provides suggestions for practitioners on how to better leverage people, process, and technology in mitigating IT project risks.
Keywords: IT projects; technical risk; team processes; cultural contingency theory; risk mitigation; project management; project risk

Power of Mobile Peer Groups: A Design-Oriented Approach to Address Youth Unemployment - Klier, Julia; Klier, Mathias; Thiel, Lea; Agarwal, Ritu (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
To investigate the societal value of digital peer groups in the context of youth unemployment, one of society’s most pressing problems, we developed a novel mobile peer-group-based career counseling approach. Following a design-oriented methodology, we constructed an intervention in which we supplement offline one-on-one counseling sessions between youths and career counselors with mobile peer groups where youths can support one another in a trusting environment, independent of time and place. We evaluated the career counseling intervention, implemented on a WhatsApp platform, in a randomized field experiment conducted at the German Federal Employment Agency. Results suggest that the mobile peer-group-based career counseling approach offers substantial added value compared with traditional career counseling. It significantly increases a youth’s chances of finding employment while improving his or her attitude towards career choice, career maturity, and career search intensity. Our study contributes to literature on the societal impacts of information and communication technologies and to research in design science. The proposed mobile intervention has important policy implications for addressing youth unemployment.
Keywords: : societal benefits of ICT; mobile peer group; online peer group; youth unemployment; unemployment mitigation; field experiment

Visual Background Music: Creativity Support Systems with Priming - Minas, Randall K; Dennis, Alan R (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Developing creative solutions to problems is often a key element of organizational decision making. Much research has been done on systems to support individual creativity, called Creativity Support Systems (CSS). Commercially available CSS and past CSS research have offered either a structured approach to the problem or provided stimuli to help the user think about the problem in a different way. We conducted two experiments testing an approach that builds on priming research by providing stimuli related to achievement on the screen as users worked, as what we call visual background music. Our findings show that this approach increased an individual’s creative output by 10–40% depending upon the experiment and outcome measure. Under the conditions of our studies, the priming stimuli we used had the strongest effect on the flexibility pathway by broadening the user’s consideration of the solution space, rather than the persistence pathway of encouraging more ideas within a topic category. A key implication of this study for CSS design is to add a banner that has rotating pictures about achievement to existing CSS.
Keywords: priming; creativity; creativity support systems; idea generation; dual pathway model; stimuli provider; visual background music; priming creativity

The IT Identity Threat: A Conceptual Definition and Operational Measure - Craig, Kevin; Thatcher, Jason Bennett; Grover, Varun (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
As individuals’ relationships with information technology (IT) grow more complex and personal, our understanding of the problem of resistance to IT continues to evolve. Current approaches to resistance are based on perceived threats to work tasks and social structure. This work enhances our understanding of resistance by developing a definition and measure of the IT Identity Threat, a new construct that integrates social, task-related, and personal factors of resistance. Grounded in identity theory, the IT Identity Threat offers a parsimonious means to explain and predict IT resistance behaviors. Using data from two independent studies conducted among students and faculty at a large university in the Southeastern United States, we validate an operational measure of IT Identity Threat as a second-order construct and demonstrate that it successfully predicts resistance to IT. Our findings provide support for the IT Identity Threat construct as a simple mechanism to study resistance to IT.
Keywords: IT Identity; Identity Theory; Resistance to IT; self-esteem; Identity Threat

Spillover Effects of Financial Incentives on Non-Incentivized User Engagement: Evidence from an Online Knowledge Exchange Platform - Kuang, Lini; Huang, Ni; Hong, Yili; Yan, Zhijun (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Online knowledge exchange platforms have become an important information technology (IT) artifact that empowers online learning for the Internet users. A key challenge for knowledge exchange platforms is how to motivate the desirable user engagement behaviors. Based on the motivation theory and the equity theory, we propose a set of hypotheses regarding the spillover effects of financial incentives on three types of desirable yet non-incentivized user engagement, namely, voluntary knowledge sharing, knowledge seeking, and social engagement. We obtain an archival data set from a major online knowledge exchange platform (Zhihu.com) to evaluate our hypotheses. Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment wherein the platform implemented a paid knowledge sharing feature, we employ difference-in-differences models in tandem with propensity score matching to evaluate the spillover effects of financial incentives on the abovementioned types of engagements. Our results show that the initial financial incentives on the paid knowledge sharing activities further motivate users to voluntarily share more knowledge and increase their social engagement in the platform. However, the financial incentives have no significant impact on users’ knowledge seeking behavior. Our study suggests that the financial incentives not just have an effect on incentivized engagement, but they spillover to users’ desirable non-incentivized online engagement behaviors. Therefore, the overall positive effect of financial incentives to a platform is likely under-estimated in prior research. Our research offers implications to practice that financial incentives can be an effective strategy to nurture users, to seed content, and to enhance sociality of a platform.
Keywords: financial incentives; spillover effect; user engagement; knowledge sharing; knowledge seeking; social engagement; online platforms; user motivation

Effective Coordination of Shared Leadership in Global Virtual Teams - Nordbäck, Emma S; Espinosa, J Alberto (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
In this study we investigate how shared leadership is coordinated in global virtual teams and how it relates to team effectiveness. Based on 71 interviews with team members and leaders from eight teams from two global software development companies, we found that shared leadership had a more positive effect on team effectiveness when shared leadership was coordinated both implicitly and behaviorally. Implicit leadership coordination is about members sharing same perceptions or cognitive schemas regarding who has leadership over what, and influences whether leadership actions are acted upon. With a mix of national cultures in the team, members are less likely to share the same leadership expectations, which may make shared leadership less effective. In turn, behavioral leadership coordination is associated with the explicit actions aimed at coordinating the leadership activities taking place in the team. This behavioral coordination increases in importance with a higher degree of shared leadership. Our findings contribute to theory and practice by showing that when leadership is highly shared in the team and uncoordinated, it may actually lead to detrimental effects in terms of lower team effectiveness. In contrast, shared leadership may reap its potential benefits if it is well coordinated.
Keywords: global virtual teams; team leadership; team effectiveness; shared leadership; online leadership

Effect of Friends’ Churn on Consumer Behavior in Mobile Networks - Ferreira, Pedro; Telang, Rahul; De Matos, Miguel Godinho (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
We study how consumers decide which tariff plan to choose and whether to churn when their friends churn in the mobile industry. We develop a theoretical model showing conditions under which users remain with their carrier and conditions under which they churn when their friends do. We then use a large and rich anonymized longitudinal panel of call detailed records to characterize the consumers’ path to death with unprecedented level of detail. We explore the structure of the network inferred from these data to derive instruments for friends’ churn, which is typically endogenous in network settings. This allows us to econometrically identify the effect of peer influence in our setting. On average, we find that each additional friend that churns increases the monthly churn rate by 0.06 percent. The observed monthly churn rate across our dataset is 2.15 percent. We also find that firms introducing the pre-paid tariff plans that charge the same price to call users inside and outside the carrier help retain consumers that would otherwise churn. In our setting, without this tariff plan the monthly churn rate could have been as high as 8.09 percent. We perform a number of robustness checks, in particular to how we define friends in the social graph, and show that our results remain unchanged. Our paper shows that the traditional definition of customer lifetime value underestimates the value of consumers and, in particular, that of consumers with more friends due to the effect of contagious churn and, therefore, managers should actively take into account the structure of the social network when prioritizing whom to target during retention campaigns.
Keywords: : telecommunications tariffs; mobile churn; contagious churn; tariff plans; telecommunications industry

Monetary Incentive and Stock Opinions on Social Media - Chen, Hailiang; Hu, Yu Jeffrey; Huang, Shan (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Not only is social media a new channel to obtain financial market information, it has also become a venue for investors to share and exchange investment ideas. We examine the performance consequences of providing monetary incentive to both existing and new amateur analysts on social media and its implications for online investor communities. We find that monetary incentive is effective in increasing the amount of content output and generating more interest from the community, but it leads to neither better nor worse stock recommendations. Additional analysis suggests that monetary incentive results in wider stock and industry coverage, a sign of increased content diversity. This study contributes to the understanding of the role of monetary incentive in stimulating the sharing of value-relevant information by investors in social media communities.
Keywords: monetary incentive; stock opinions; social media; wisdom of crowds; investment advice; incentives in co-creation

Digital Borders, Location Recognition, and Experience Attribution within a Digital Geography - Dunn, Brian Kimball; Ramasubbu, Narayan; Galletta, Dennis F; Lowry, Paul Benjamin (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
During an online session, a user may visit a number of websites, often following hyperlinks from one website to the next or using a search results page to find and visit pages of interest. In doing so, the user can lose track of which sites were visited and which were helpful in meeting the objective. Thus, sites that may have provided value to the user may not receive expected positive effects such as loyalty and intention to return. It is thus crucial to understand if and how an individual website is perceived by users within the context of multi-website online sessions—particularly in predicting desired outcomes, such as user loyalty, trust, brand image, and revisit intentions. To address this problem, we conceptualize the Web as a geography traversed by users who cross digital borders as they move from one website location to another. We introduce the concept of border strength, or the degree to which digital media artifacts mark a transition to a website, and propose a positive effect of border strength on users’ recognition of their locations. We then consider users’ attribution of credit for assistance in successfully completing an online task to those websites and their owners that supported the task. This attribution is a function of border strength and location recognition. We test these hypotheses using experimental data, which show that, indeed, some websites go unrecognized and that stronger borders increase users’ recognition of having visited a website and users’ credit attribution for their experience to the site. Our findings demonstrate the usefulness of the geography metaphor, suggest the need to further study dynamics regarding individual sites within the context of multi-site sessions and show the usefulness of erecting stronger borders to mark the entry into digital locations.
Keywords: digital borders; digital geography; online experience; web experience attribution; space and place theory; memory; website design; web traversal

Acting Like Humans? Anthropomorphism and Consumer’s Willingness to Pay in Electronic Commerce - Yuan, Lingyao (Ivy); Dennis, Alan R (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics to a non-human object. Past research shows that anthropomorphism changes how we perceive objects (e.g., believing them to be more attractive). Does this mean we would be willing to pay more for them? We examined whether displaying a product in an anthropomorphized form influenced how much a consumer was willing to pay. We examined two design aspects, visual (i.e., a face) and auditory (e.g., a voice), in the context of an online auction, and proposed three theoretical routes by which an anthropomorphic product display might affect willingness to pay (emotional, product attachment, and product quality). Results show that adding visual anthropomorphizing features to the way a product was displayed increased the amount bid by 7 percent, but adding auditory anthropomorphizing features had no effect. The visual anthropomorphizing features increased product attachment but had no effect on emotions or perceptions of product quality. Therefore, we conclude that anthropomorphizing the way a product is displayed increases willingness to pay primarily through the theoretical route of creating attachment to the product. There is an additional, as yet undiscovered, theoretical route through which anthropomorphism influences willingness to pay. The results also suggest that the conventional wisdom that the combination of visual and auditory design features is best for triggering anthropomorphism is not always true.
Keywords: : anthropomorphism; online auction; willingness to pay; product attachment

Quality Assessment of Peer-Produced Content in Knowledge Repositories using Development and Coordination Activities - Velichety, Srikar; Ram, Sudha; Bockstedt, Jesse (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
We develop a method to assess the quality of peer-produced content in knowledge repositories using their development and coordination histories. We also develop a process to identify relevant features for quality assessment models and algorithms for processing datasets in large-scale knowledge repositories. Models using these features, on English language Wikipedia articles, outperform existing methods for quality assessment. We achieve an overall accuracy of 81 percent which is a 7 percent improvement over existing models. In addition, our features improve the precision and recall of each class up to 9 percent and 17 percent respectively. Finally, our models are robust to ten-fold cross validation and techniques used for classification. Overall, our research provides a comprehensive design science framework for both identifying and efficiently extracting features related to development and coordination activities and assessing quality using these features. We also provide details of potential implementation of a quality assessment system for knowledge repositories.
Keywords: knowledge repositories; Wikipedia; peer-produced content; design science; big data analytics; predictive analytics

Mobile Time-Based Targeting: Matching Product-Value Appeal to Time of Day - Phang, Chee Wei; Luo, Xueming; Fang, Zheng (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Mobile technologies, with their seamless integration into people’s everyday life, are said to enable “perpetual contact” with the users always accompanied by their mobile devices. This creates unprecedented opportunity to better understand the relationship between time and information technologies (ITs), in particular, how time of day may influence users’ IT behavior. With this understanding, companies may also be able to promote IT products by highlighting their value that appeals to users in a particular time segment of a day. Building primarily on the ego depletion theory and through conducting a combination of field experiment and survey, we show that matching IT product value appeal to people’s psychological state during different times of day can lead to more optimal outcome (higher adoption). The findings advance our understanding of how IT behavior, as a behavior embedded in time, is affected by time of day, and provide actionable guidance to practitioners in performing mobile time-based targeting.
Keywords: : mobile targeting; time-of-day targeting; IT product value; mobile Internet service; consumer psychology; randomized field experiment

Threshold Effects on Backer Motivations in Reward-Based Crowdfunding - Li, Gen; Wang, Jing (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Reward-based crowdfunding has been increasingly used by entrepreneurs and small businesses to raise capital for their creative projects. To keep the money raised, most platforms require that the total amount of pledged money must exceed a pre-specified funding goal. In this study, we aim to gain a better understanding of backer motivations by empirically investigating their pledging and sharing patterns at different stages of achieving the funding threshold. By analyzing a unique dataset that records the bi-hourly backer support for 1,058 successful Kickstarter projects, we find two threshold-induced effects. First, there is a sharp increase in the number of backers and Facebook shares during the few hours when the project approaches its funding threshold. Second, the numbers of backers and Facebook shares are substantially higher in the few days before the threshold is reached than in the few days afterward. We show that both effects are more pronounced in public-good than in private-good project categories. Our findings provide clear evidence for a strong effect of prosocial motivation in driving backer behaviors. In addition, the results support that both goal proximity and project prosociality have a positive impact on the prosocial motivation of backers.
Keywords: reward-based crowdfunding; prosocial motivation; economic motivation; goal proximity; uncertainty; public goods; private goods; fundraising

Cyberbullying on Social Networking Sites: The Crime Opportunity and Affordance Perspectives - Chan, Tommy K H; Cheung, Christy M K; Wong, Randy Y M (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Cyberbullying on social networking sites (SNS bullying) is an emerging societal challenge related to the deviant use of technologies. To address the research gaps identified in the literature, we draw on crime opportunity theory and the affordance perspective to propose a meta-framework that guides our investigation into SNS bullying. The meta-framework explains how SNS affordances give rise to the evaluation of favorable SNS environmental conditions for SNS bullying, which, in turn, promote SNS bullying. The research model was empirically tested using a longitudinal online survey of 223 SNS users. The results suggest that the evaluation of SNS environmental conditions predict SNS bullying, and SNS affordances influence the evaluation of these environmental conditions. This work offers a new theoretical perspective to study SNS bullying, highlighting the critical impacts of environmental conditions in shaping such behavior. It also provides actionable insights into measures that combat SNS bullying.
Keywords: cyberbullying; SNS bullying; crime opportunity; affordance; social networking sites; meta-framework; societal impacts of technology use; IT deviant use

Social Influence on Future Review Sentiments: An Appraisal-Theoretic View - Jha, Ashish Kumar; Shah, Snehal (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Given the importance of online reviews, as evidenced by extant research, we studied an understudied area of the impact of past reviews on sentiments of future reviews. Past studies in the emergent area of incidence of reviews have investigated the generation of ratings but there seems to be a lacuna in the second dimension of the reviews (i.e., the textual sentiments). Through a controlled experiment (N = 232), we analyzed the impact of past reviews on reviewers’ subsequent texts by using the unique lens of social appraisal theory. We found the influence of the selection of reviews on most e-commerce websites could strongly bias subsequent written review sentiments, and this effect is more pronounced when the reviewer experienced higher disconfirmation. We also observed review writers tend to post extreme reviews in the absence of any benchmark or prior reviews. The study results extend the understanding of users’ reviews under social influence and enhance the appraisal theoretic understanding of review generation.
Keywords: social appraisal theory; sentiment analysis; online reviews; controlled experiment; e-WoM; user reviews

Effectiveness of IT Service Management Capability: Value Co-Creation and Value Facilitation Mechanisms - Winkler, Till J; Wulf, Jochen (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Information technology service management (ITSM) has become the prevalent management approach to the provision of IT services worldwide. Researchers and practitioners, however, still lack an understanding regarding through which mechanisms and in which strategic contexts an ITSM capability contributes most to information systems (IS) effectiveness. Grounded in a service-dominant logic, we hypothesize that ITSM capability contributes to IS effectiveness through sustaining the alignment of the IS function with the business and contingent upon organizational IS strategic conservativeness. Data collected from 256 organizations confirms that direct effects from ITSM capability are mediated by IS-business alignment and strengthened by IS strategic conservativeness. Our findings provide evidence for a co-occurrence of value co-creation and value facilitation mechanisms in internal IT service relationships and for a greater value of ITSM capability in stable strategic contexts. Overall, our results contribute a novel understanding to the service literature of the distinct mechanisms and the facilitating contextual contingencies of value creation in IT service relationships.
Keywords: information technology service management (ITSM); service-dominant logic; information systems (IS) effectiveness; IS-business alignment; IS strategy; IS conservative; value co-creation; value facilitation

Framework of Affordances for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality - Steffen, Jacob H; Gaskin, James E; Meservy, Thomas O; Jenkins, Jeffrey L; Wolman, Iopa (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies continue to grow and present possibilities to change the ways we learn, accomplish tasks, and interact with the world. However, widespread adoption has continually languished below purported potential. We suggest that a more complete understanding of the underlying motives driving users to take advantage of VR and AR would aid researchers by consolidating fragmented knowledge across domains and by identifying paths for additional inquiry. Additionally, practitioners could identify areas of unmet motives for using VR and AR. To examine the motives for virtualization, we draw upon Gibson’s seminal work on affordances to create a framework of generalized affordances for virtually assisted activities relative to the affordances of physical reality. This framework facilitates comparison of virtualized activities to non-virtualized activities, comparison of similar activities across VR and AR, and delineates areas of inquiry for future research. The validity of the framework was explored through two quantitative studies and one qualitative study of a wide variety of professionals. We found that participants perceive a significant difference between physical reality and both VR and AR for all proposed affordances, and that for many affordances, users perceive a difference in the ability of AR and VR to enact them. The qualitative study confirmed the general structure of the framework, while also revealing additional sub-affordances to explore. Theoretically, this suggests that examining the affordances that differentiate these technologies from physical reality may be a valid approach to understanding why users adopt these technologies. Practitioners may find success by focusing development on the specific affordances that VR or AR is best equipped to enact.
Keywords: augmented reality; virtual reality; technology affordances; virtually assisted activities; theoretical framework; adoption motivations; technology adoption

Social Influence and Monetization of Freemium Social Games - Fang, Bin; Zheng, Zhiqiang (Eric); Ye, Qiang; Goes, Paulo B (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
One fundamental economic challenge in social gaming is how to monetize players. We address this problem from the lens of social influence. Specifically, we examine how players’ paying behaviors in a social game are associated with their pure friends and Simmelian-tie friends. Analyzing a comprehensive social game dataset provided by Tencent.com, we find that the cohesion effect emanating from players’ direct connections in the social gaming network exhibits positive impacts on players’ willingness to pay. Surprisingly, the cohesion effect of pure friends is found to be significantly stronger than that of Simmelian-tie friends, contrary to the common findings in the literature. These new findings have direct implications for companies tasked with designing social games or gamification systems and, more broadly, to help better understand the mechanism behind the microscopic economic behavior of individuals in a virtual economy.
Keywords: online games; social games; freemium social gaming; player cohesion; Simmelian tie; online monetization

Shopping in Virtual Reality Stores: The Influence of Immersion on System Adoption - Peukert, Christian; Pfeiffer, Jella; Meißner, Martin; Pfeiffer, Thies; Weinhardt, Christof (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Companies have the opportunity to better engage potential customers by presenting products to them in a highly immersive virtual reality (VR) shopping environment. However, a minimal amount is known about why and whether customers will adopt such fully immersive shopping environments. We therefore develop and experimentally validate a theoretical model, which explains how immersion affects adoption. The participants experienced the environment by using a head-mounted display (high immersion) or by viewing product models in 3D on a desktop (low immersion). We find that immersion does not affect the users’ intention to reuse the shopping environment, because two paths cancel each other out: Highly immersive shopping environments positively influence a hedonic path through telepresence, but surprisingly, they negatively influence a utilitarian path through product diagnosticity. We can explain this effect via low readability of product information in the VR environment and expect VR’s full potential to develop when the technology is further advanced. Our study contributes to literature on immersive systems and IS adoption research by introducing a research model for the adoption of VR shopping environments. A key practical implication of our study is that system designers need to pay special attention to the current state of technology when designing VR applications.
Keywords: virtual reality; laboratory experiments; immersive retail; IS adoption; hedonic and utilitarian information systems; consumer engagement

Try It On! Contingency Effects of Virtual Fitting Rooms - Yang, Shuai; Xiong, Guiyang (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
A revolutionary application of the virtual reality technology in online retailing, virtual fitting room (VFR), has attracted attention of researchers and practitioners recently. However, it remains unclear whether and how VFR influences sales and post-sales outcomes based on the limited literature, and retailers hesitate in adopting the technology due to concerns about its profit prospects. In this research, we conduct two large-scale field experiments to test the causal effects of different VFR designs, and a lab experiment to unveil the underlying theoretical mechanisms. We find that, although VFR can have a sizeable positive effect on sales, it can be counterproductive when used improperly. Specifically, personalized VFR may not increase sales if used in combination with conventional product visualizations because self-discrepancy becomes salient under this condition. Moreover, VFR significantly influences post-sales outcomes, i.e., it enhances customer satisfaction and reduces product return rate. The findings provide distinct theoretical contributions and managerial implications.
Keywords: virtual reality; virtual fitting room; online sales; customer satisfaction; product returns

Touching Products Virtually: Facilitating Consumer Mental Imagery with Gesture Control and Visual Presentation - Liu, Yang (Alison); Jiang, Zhenhui (Jack); Chan, Hock Chuan (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Gesture-based interaction has greatly changed the way in which we interact with online products by allowing users to control digital systems with hand movements. This study investigates how gesture-based interaction modes, namely, mid-air gesture and touchscreen gesture, compared with mouse-based interaction, affect consumers’ virtual product experiences (VPE) by eliciting mental imagery (i.e., haptic imagery and spatial imagery). Furthermore, we explore how visual product presentation can be designed to facilitate different types of interaction modes. Through a lab experiment, we find that touchscreen gesture outper- forms mid-air gesture and mouse-based interaction in terms of eliciting haptic imagery, and this effect is mitigated when 3D presentation is used. We also find that mid-air gesture outperforms touchscreen gesture and mouse-based interaction in terms of eliciting spatial imagery when 3D presentation is used. Both haptic imagery and spatial imagery can further reduce consumers’ product uncertainty. Our results extend prior work on interactivity design of VPE and further contribute to the emerging literature on gesture-based interaction.
Keywords: virtual product experience; gesture-based interaction; grounded cognition; mental imagery; product presentation

Benefits of IT-Enabled Flexibilities for Foreign versus Local Firms in Emerging Economies - Khuntia, Jiban; Kathuria, Abhishek; Saldanha, Terence JV; Konsynski, Benn R (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Emerging economies present attractive opportunities to foreign firms. However, internationalization risk faced by foreign firms can have significant implications for their performance relative to local firms. Information Technology (IT) and IT-enabled capabilities help firms overcome internationalization risk and compete globally. Marketing Capability and Relational Capability also mitigate this risk through access to information related to markets and the business environment. We examine how foreign firms and local firms compare in leveraging synergies between such IT and firm capabilities. We focus on two kinds of IT-enabled capabilities: IT-enabled Flexibility in Customer Services, and IT-enabled Flexibility in Partner Services, and develop hypotheses for their complementary effects with Marketing Capability and Relational Capability respectively, to positively influence firm performance. We then draw on the firm-specific advantages framework to argue that foreign firms face a comparative disadvantage relative to local firms in leveraging the synergy between IT-enabled Flexibility in Customer Services and Marketing Capability. In contrast, foreign firms enjoy a comparative advantage relative to local firms in leveraging the synergy between IT-enabled Flexibility in Partner Services and Relational Capability. Empirical analysis using matched-pair survey and secondary data of 182 foreign and local firms in India supports our hypotheses. Our findings highlight important differences in how foreign and local firms benefit from IT, thus contributing towards a better understanding of how context and contingencies influence IT implications in emerging economies.
Keywords: emerging economies; foreign firms; internationalization risk; firm-specific advantage; firm performance; firm capabilities; IT-enabled capabilities; IT-enabled flexibility

Generating Business Intelligence Through Social Media Analytics: Measuring Brand Personality with Consumer-, Employee-, and Firm-Generated Content - Hu, Yuheng; Xu, Anbang; Hong, Yili; Gal, David; Sinha, Vibha; Akkiraju, Rama (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Social media platforms provide an enormous public repository of textual data from which valuable information can be extracted. We show that firms can extract business intelligence from social media data bearing on an important business application, measuring brand personality. Specifically, we develop a text analytics framework that integrates different distinct sources of social media data generated by consumers, employees, and firms, to measure brand personality. Based on Elastic-Net regression analyses of a large corpus of social media data, including self-descriptions of 1,996,214 consumers who followed the sample of brands on social media, 312,400 employee reviews of the brands’ firms, and 680,056 brand official tweets, we develop a brand personality model that achieves prediction accuracy as high as 0.78. Among key insights, we find that the profile of individuals who choose to associate with brands on social media is an important predictor of brand personality; this provides the first real-world evidence for a consumer identity-brand personality link. We also identify a link between an organization’s internal corporate environment as perceived by employees and brand personality as judged by consumers. We further illuminate the practical implication of our predictive model by building a cloud-based information system that allows managers and analysts to explore and track personality of their own brands and their competitors’ brands.
Keywords: social media analytics; business intelligence; consumer-generated content; employee-generated content; firm-generated content; brand personality

Combating Fake News on Social Media with Source Ratings: The Effects of User and Expert Reputation Ratings - Kim, Antino; Moravec, Patricia L; Dennis, Alan R (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
As a remedy against fake news on social media, we examine the effectiveness of three different mechanisms for source ratings that can be applied to articles when they are initially published: expert rating (where expert reviewers fact-check articles, which are aggregated to provide a source rating), user article rating (where users rate articles, which are aggregated to provide a source rating), and user source rating (where users rate the sources themselves). We conducted two experiments and found that source ratings influenced social media users’ beliefs in the articles and that the rating mechanisms behind the ratings mattered. Low ratings, which would mark the usual culprits in spreading fake news, had stronger effects than did high ratings. When the ratings were low, users paid more attention to the rating mechanism, and, overall, expert ratings and user article ratings had stronger effects than did user source ratings. We also noticed a second-order effect, where ratings on some sources led users to be more skeptical of sources without ratings, even with instructions to the contrary. A user’s belief in an article, in turn, influenced the extent to which users would engage with the article (e.g., read, like, comment and share). Lastly, we found confirmation bias to be prominent; users were more likely to believe — and spread — articles that aligned with their beliefs. Overall, our results show that source rating is a viable measure against fake news and propose how the rating mechanism should be designed.
Keywords: fake news; online misinformation; social media; combating fake news; online article rating; online source rating; online expert rating; online user rating; fact-checking

Factors Affecting the Adoption of an Electronic Word of Mouth Message: A Meta-Analysis - Qahri-Saremi, Hamed; Montazemi, Ali Reza (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Electronic word of mouth (eWoM) messages are increasingly consequential for consumers’ decisions regarding products/services. This has led to a large body of scholarly research on factors affecting eWoM message adoption. Adoption of an eWoM message refers to accepting the information and recommendations contained in an eWoM message, which consequently influence consumers’ cognitive and behavioral tendencies toward pertinent products/services. Notwithstanding the contributions of prior eWoM studies, we observe inconsistent findings across these studies that make a consensus difficult to reach. Lack of consistency is also evident among eWoM service providers in the selection and presentation order of the pertinent factors on their sites. To address this gap, we draw on the heuristic-systematic model in a meta-analytic structural equation modeling study to test a nomological eWoM adoption model that assesses the factors affecting the adoption of an eWoM message. Our meta-analysis of 87 eWoM studies, comprising 105,318 observations, sheds light on eight factors toward eWoM message adoption. Our findings unravel the multitude of ways in which these factors can influence eWoM message adoption and show the relative importance of these factors based on their total effects on eWoM message adoption. This enables the eWoM service providers to enhance the inconsistencies in the selection and presentation order of important factors toward eWoM message adoption on their sites.
Keywords: electronic word of mouth; eWoM message adoption; message helpfulness; online reviews; additive effect; bias effect; attenuated effect; meta-analysis; TSSEM; Heuristic-Systematic Model; structural equation modeling

An Economic Analysis of Platform Protection in the Presence of Content Substitutability - Nan, Guofang; Yao, Lina; Ho, Yi-Chun (Chad); Li, Zhiyong; Li, Minqiang (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Online platforms, such as App Store and Kindle, are facing a common dilemma: while the implementation of technology-based protection impedes piracy and hence boosts demand from legal users (positive effect), the resulting restriction meanwhile imposes some level of disutility on the same due to inconvenience (negative effect). This paper investigates a monopolistic platform’s optimal protection level and pricing strategy under an agency business model (content agency model or advertising agency model). We find that the platform’s protection strategy hinges on the relative magnitude of the two opposing effects of protection. When the negative effect dominates, the minimal protection is optimal. However, as the positive effect becomes more salient, the platform has an incentive to increase the protection level. We also find that although the demand of non-pure platform users always increases as the level of content substitutability rises under the minimal and maximal protection regions, it is not necessarily the case under the medium protection region. The study advances our understanding of the content protection against piracy from a platform’s perspective. Our findings also provide insights into business model decision when platform protection is endogenously determined.
Keywords: online platforms; two-sided platforms; platform protection; online piracy; pricing; content agency; advertising agency; content protection

Platform Competition in the Sharing Economy: Understanding How Ride-Hailing Services Influence New Car Purchases - Guo, Yue; Li, Xiaotong; Zeng, Xiaohua (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Ride-hailing services provide not only alternative transportation for passengers but also job opportunities for potential drivers, resulting in both negative and positive effects on new car purchases. Our study assesses the impact of ride-hailing platforms’ market entry on new car purchases in the presence of platform competition. Our data is a monthly panel data on new car registration plates from 2013 to 2015, during which two leading ride-hailing platforms (Didi Chuxing and Uber) rolled out their services across select cities in China. We find that, while the entry of a single ride-hailing platform led to a decline in new car purchases, platform competition mitigated the negative impacts of platform entries. Our explanation is that the two competing platforms may have provided subsidies to drivers such that more people purchased new cars in order to sign up as drivers. By leveraging brand heterogeneity, our analysis finds supporting evidence that platform competition has resulted in increased sales of those car brands that are commonly adopted by ride-hailing drivers. Our study contributes to the literature on pricing strategies and subsidy allocation for two-sided markets by providing empirical evidence from the ride-hailing market. It suggests that companies’ competitive strategies need to account for consumer expectations and learning in the presence of strong network effects.
Keywords: causal inference; competitive strategies; consumer expectations; Didi Chuxing; ride-hailing; staggered difference-in-differences; synthetic control methodology; Uber; car market; car-riding platforms

Disrupting Unwanted Habits in Online Gambling Through Information Technology - Hou, Jinghui (Jove); Kim, Keehyung; Kim, Sung S; Ma, Xiao (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
The instant access to gambling anytime, anywhere, has made online gambling highly habitual for some people. As a result, some online gamblers choose to volitionally enable the website-provided disruptive information technology (IT) features to control their gambling routines. The objective of this study is to examine the role of these features in regulating online gambling behavior. It is worthwhile to note that in this research, we do not make the assumption that habitual or regular online gambling is a bad thing; nor does the development of our conceptual framework — which focuses on the effect of disruptive IT features and moderating roles of individual regularity and game type in modifying gambling routines — depend on such an assumption. Drawing on theories of habitual automaticity and habit disruption, the conceptual framework theorizes the efficacy and mechanism of disruptive features while taking into account heterogeneity in individual regularity and game type. We tested the model using data collected over 10 years from 3,526 users of a gambling website. First, we found that individuals’ repetitive gambling patterns weakened as the duration of exposure to disruptive features increased. Second, the behavior of more regular gamblers was more resistant to the disruptive features, because more regular gamblers exhibited a stronger habitual pattern. Third, disruptive features were less effective on sports games compared with casino games, because sports gamblers tended to exhibit stronger gambling routines. Overall, the present study contributes to the information systems (IS) literature by clarifying how simple IT features may disrupt unwanted and difficult-to-break online gambling habits as judged by the gamblers. Our findings are likeliest to apply to broader areas of online services in which the application in question is integrated into everyday life and the system can offer a disruptive mechanism.
Keywords: online gambling; habit disruption; online habits; automaticity; individual regularity; casino games; sports games; online games; negative online habits

Detecting Anomalous Online Reviewers: An Unsupervised Approach Using Mixture Models - Kumar, Naveen; Venugopal, Deepak; Qiu, Liangfei; Kumar, Subodha (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Online reviews play a significant role in influencing decisions made by users in day-to-day life. The presence of reviewers who deliberately post fake reviews for financial or other gains, however, negatively impacts both users and businesses. Unfortunately, automatically detecting such reviewers is a challenging problem since fake reviews do not seem out-of-place next to genuine reviews. In this paper, we present a fully unsupervised approach to detect anomalous behavior in online reviewers. We propose a novel hierarchical approach for this task in which we (1) derive distributions for key features that define reviewer behavior, and (2) combine these distributions into a finite mixture model. Our approach is highly generalizable and it allows us to seamlessly combine both univariate and multivariate distributions into a unified anomaly detection system. Most importantly, it requires no explicit labeling (spam/not spam) of the data. Our newly developed approach outperforms prior state-of-the-art unsupervised anomaly detection approaches.
Keywords: online reviews; fake reviews; opinion spam; unsupervised learning; anomaly detection; mixture models; deception detection

An Integrative Theory Addressing Cyberharassment in the Light of Technology-Based Opportunism - Lowry, Paul Benjamin; Zhang, Jun; Moody, Gregory D; Chatterjee, Sutirtha; Wang, Chuang; Wu, Tailai (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Scholars are increasingly calling for a deeper understanding of cyberharassment (CH) with the goal of devising policies, procedures, and technologies to mitigate it. Accordingly, we conducted CH research that (1) integrated social learning theory (SLT) and self-control theory (SCT); (2) empirically studied this model with two contrasting samples, experienced cyberharassers and less experienced cyberharassers; and (3) conducted post hoc tests to tease out the differences between the two samples. We show that for less experienced cyberharassers, CH is largely a social-psychological-technological phenomenon; whereas, for experienced cyberharassers, CH is primarily a psychological-technological phenomenon. Our study makes a threefold contribution: (1) it shows the value of integrating two theories in a holistic and parsimonious manner to explain CH; (2) it shows that SCT alone is a more relevant framework for experienced cyberharassers, whereas a combination of SCT and SLT better explains less experienced cyberharassers; and (3) it reveals that the role of technology in fostering CH is crucial, regardless of the sample. The differential, yet consistent, findings demonstrate that addressing CH is contingent upon not only identifying theoretical approaches but also identifying the particular samples to which these theoretical approaches will be more suitable. Of several implications for practice, the most important may be that anonymity, asynchronicity, and lack of monitoring are the technology choices that foster CH, and thus these should be mitigated in designing social media and other communication technologies
Keywords: cyberharassment; deviance; self-control theory; social learning theory; technology-based opportunism; social-psychological-technological (S-P-T) phenomenon; online harassment

An Information Processing View on Joint Vendor Performance in Multi-Sourcing: The Role of the Guardian - Oshri, Ilan; Dibbern, Jens; Kotlarsky, Julia; Krancher, Oliver (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
This paper examines joint vendor performance in multi-sourcing arrangements. Using an Information Processing View, we argue that managing interdependencies between multiple vendors imposes substantial information processing (IP) requirements on clients. To achieve high joint performance, clients therefore need to possess sufficient IP capacity. We examine how three sources of IP capacity, two internal (i.e., the client’s inter-vendor governance and the client’s architectural knowledge) and one external (i.e., the guardian vendor), work together in realizing joint performance. Our results show that formal governance and architectural knowledge contribute to joint performance. The guardian vendor contributes to joint performance in settings where the client deploys strong governance but lacks architectural knowledge. This suggests that, contrary to common views in the literature, guardian vendors should not be understood as mediators (or single points of contact) who relieve clients from governance efforts. Instead, guardian vendors are more fruitfully understood as architects, who complement the client’s governance efforts by compensating for knowledge gaps. Put simply, client firms should consider using a guardian vendor to compensate for weak architectural knowledge while still maintaining strong formal and informal governance of all vendors.
Keywords: multi-sourcing; joint performance; guardian; governance; architectural knowledge; information processing view

Deliberate or Instinctive? Proactive and Reactive Coping for Technostress - Pirkkalainen, Henri; Salo, Markus; Tarafdar, Monideepa; Makkonen, Markus (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Employees in organizations face technostress that is, stress from information technology (IT) use. Although technostress is a highly prevalent organizational phenomenon, there is a lack of theory-based understanding on how IT users can cope with it. We theorize and validate a model for deliberate proactive and instinctive reactive coping for technostress. Drawing from theories on coping, our model posits that the reactive coping behaviors of distress venting and distancing from IT can alleviate technostress by diminishing the negative effect of technostress creators on IT-enabled productivity. The proactive coping behaviors of positive reinterpretation and IT control can help IT users by influencing the extent to which reactive coping behaviors are effective and by positively influencing IT-enabled productivity. The findings of a cross-sectional survey study of 846 organizational IT users support the model. The paper provides a new theoretical contribution by identifying ways in which organizational IT users can cope with technostress.
Keywords: technostress; technostress coping; proactive coping; reactive coping; information systems use

Adherence to Clinical Guidelines, Electronic Health Record Use, and Online Reviews - Saifee, Danish H; Bardhan, Indranil R; Lahiri, Atanu; Zheng, Zhiqiang (Eric) (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
To increase transparency of healthcare quality, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) initiated the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS). However, the impact of PQRS on physicians is unclear, particularly as related to their online reputation. Is there an association between a physician’s online reputation and her adherence to clinical guidelines stipulated in the PQRS? Is online reputation associated with use of electronic health records (EHR)? To investigate these questions, we combine data on online physician reviews with the PQRS data on clinical guideline adherence and EHR use. Unlike prior research, which primarily uses clinical outcomes as proxies for care quality, our study uses adherence to clinical guidelines, a process measure that reflects physician conformance with evidence-based clinical practices. In addition, we focus on EHR use at the physician level, in contrast to the usual approach of examining it at the aggregate institutional level. Consistent with the economic theory of credence goods, we observe no significant relationship between physicians’ adherence to clinical guidelines and their online reviews. Although there is some evidence of association between EHR use and their overall rating, similar relationships are not consistently observed for individual dimensional ratings. Overall, the online reputation of a physician exhibits minimal association with her actual clinical activities — and is mostly driven by latent topics in the textual reviews — implying that the ability of online reviews to inform prospective patients of care quality might be quite limited. Therefore, patients should be cautious when using online physician reviews, and policymakers should increase the accessibility of PQRS and other similar data to help patients make informed physician choices.
Keywords: clinical guidelines; physician quality reporting; online physician reviews; electronic health record; credence goods; online eWoM

Information Processing on Online Review Platforms - Siering, Michael; Janze, Christian (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Online reviews represent an important decision aid for consumers. Therefore, the question of whether online reviews reflect the currently available information is of high importance. Nevertheless, previous research neglects information processing on online review platforms. We address this research gap and analyze whether restaurant health inspection results have an impact on the review generation process of online restaurant reviews. We find that while severe health inspection results lead to changes of online review star ratings, information processing depends on the current environment. We find indications for corrective actions after critical health inspections: on the one hand, the restaurant health score improves, which shows an increase in restaurant quality. On the other hand, we observe indications for an increased amount of fake reviews in case of poorly-graded restaurants. We contribute to theory by providing an understanding of the nature of information processing on online review platforms. For practitioners, our findings allow for an understanding of the dynamics of online review generation. Furthermore, we outline the importance of considering the risk of deceptive behavior.
Keywords: online reviews; online review platforms; restaurant inspections; efficient market hypothesis; adaptive market hypothesis; event study; online deception; user-generated content

A Wikipedia-based Method to Support Creative Idea Generation: The Role of Stimulus Relatedness - Wang, Kai; Nickerson, Jeffrey V (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Providing stimuli may facilitate idea generation. Creativity theories often suggest that stimuli unrelated to the problem task will improve creativity, but empirical studies have yielded inconsistent results. We propose a Wikipedia-based approach that is able to identify stimuli at different levels of relatedness. Specifically, we use hypertext links in two sections of the Wikipedia article of a focal concept to identify closely related concepts. Repeating this procedure leads to increasingly remote concepts. Using this approach to obtain stimulus concepts, we examine the effect of stimulus relatedness on idea generation. Our results show that stimulus relatedness is positively related to idea quantity and idea usefulness. While creativity theories often suggest using unrelated stimuli to promote idea novelty, results of this experimental study indicate that remotely related stimuli, not unrelated stimuli, tend to improve idea novelty. Because Wikipedia covers knowledge in almost all disciplines, our Wikipedia-based approach can be used to discover appropriate stimuli and thereby support creative work in most domains of knowledge.
Keywords: creativity; idea generation; creativity support systems; creativity stimulation; association in creativity; Wikipedia

Diffusion on Social Media Platforms: A Point Process Model for Interaction among Similar Content - Yoo, Eunae; Gu, Bin; Rabinovich, Elliot (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
Social media platforms disseminate a massive volume of user-generated content, some of which convey similar and overlapping information. We study how the diffusion of a given piece of content (called a cascade) is influenced by the diffusion of other cascades carrying similar content (called parallel cascades). We theorize that the diffusion of a cascade can be inhibited or amplified by that of parallel cascades containing similar content. To study this phenomenon, we formulate a generalized version of the self-exciting point process model and showcase a novel approach to evaluating the parallel diffusion of similar social media content. We estimate the model using Twitter data. We observe that, on average, the diffusion of a cascade is inhibited by the concurrent diffusion of parallel cascades with similar content. We further identify an asymmetry among content producers as the diffusion of content contributed by those with larger networks is more likely to be amplified by the diffusion of similar content. Our study underscores the importance of accounting for content similarity as failing to do so may overestimate assessments of a cascade’s diffusion. Our results also suggest that smaller, individual social media content contributors should avoid publishing repetitive content and channel their efforts towards developing novel content, while this is not a concern for larger content contributors.
Keywords: cascade; content diffusion; competition for attention; parallel cascade; point process; social media; media platforms; social media content

Managing Knowledge Distance: IT-Enabled Inter-Firm Knowledge Capabilities in Collaborative Innovation - Cui, Tingru; Tong, Yu; Teo, Hock-Hai; Li, Jizhen (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Collaborating with a partner in a distant area is widely endorsed in practice as a means for inspiring novel innovations. However, empirical evidence also reports significant innovation efficiency challenges when working with distant partners due to differences in technical knowledge domain differences. In this study, we conducted a multi-method approach by using a case study of 30 interviews to develop three information technology (IT)-enabled inter-firm knowledge capabilities and testing the research model with field survey data from 258 firms. The findings of this research confirm our hypotheses that IT-enabled inter-firm knowledge exploration capability and IT-enabled inter-firm knowledge exploitation capability can help embrace the benefits of product effectiveness while IT-enabled social integration capability surmount process efficiency challenges inherent in collaboration with distant partners. This study adds a much-needed perspective to the IT and innovation literature and offers practical suggestions for firm managers to mindfully design and deploy IT resources in collaborative innovation projects.
Keywords: Collaborative innovation; IT-enabled inter-firm knowledge capabilities; inter-firm knowledge distance; product effectiveness; process efficiency

Digital Nudging: Numeric and Semantic Priming in E-Commerce - Dennis, Alan R; Yuan, Lingyao (Ivy); Feng, Xuan; Webb, Eric; Hsieh, Christine J (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Most research on e-commerce has focused on deliberate rational cognition, yet research in psychology and marketing suggests that buying decisions may also be influenced by priming (a form of what Information Systems researchers have called digital nudging). We conducted seven experiments to investigate the impact of two types of priming (numeric priming and semantic priming) delivered through what appeared to be advertisements on an e-commerce website. We found that numeric priming had a small but significant effect on consumers’ willingness to pay when the value of the product was unclear, but had no effect when products displayed a manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) or a fixed selling price. Semantic priming had larger effects on willingness to pay and the effects were significant but smaller in the presence of an MSRP. Thus, the combination of numeric and semantic priming has a larger impact on consumers’ willingness to pay. Taken together, these experiments show that some of the research on numeric priming and semantic priming done in offline settings generalizes to e-commerce settings, but there are important boundary conditions to their effects in e-commerce that have not been noted in offline settings. In online auctions (e.g., eBay), sellers can influence customers to pay more for products whose value is unclear by displaying products with clearly labelled high prices alongside the products the consumer searched for. However, such tactics will have only minimal effects for auctions of products whose price is known (e.g., those with an MSRP) and no effects on products with clearly listed prices (e.g., Amazon).
Keywords: decision making; anchoring and adjustment; priming; dual process cognition; System 1 cognition; System 2 cognition; digital nudge; online auctions; willingness to pay; pricing; price anchors

The Nature of Crowd Work and its Effects on Individuals’ Work Perception - Durward, David; Blohm, Ivo; Leimeister, Jan Marco (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Crowd work reflects a new form of gainful employment on the Internet. We study how the nature of the tasks being performed and financial compensation jointly shape work perceptions of crowd workers in order to better understand the changing modes and patterns of digital work. Surveying individuals on 23 German crowd working platforms, this work is the first to add a multi-platform perspective on perceived working conditions in crowd work. We show that crowd workers need rather high levels of financial compensation before task characteristics become relevant for shaping favorable perceptions of working conditions. We explain these results by considering financial compensation as an informational cue indicating the appreciation of working effort that is internalized by well-paid crowd workers. Resulting boundary conditions for task design are discussed. These results help us understand when and under what conditions crowd work can be regarded as a fulfilling type of employment in highly developed countries.
Keywords: Crowd work; crowdsourcing; online compensation; online tasks; online employment; task design; self-determination theory; paid crowd work

A Generational Perspective on the Software Workforce: Precocious Users of Social Networking in Software Development - Ghobadi, Shahla; Mathiassen, Lars (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Software is the lifeblood of technological advancement, and it progresses not only through emerging technologies, but also through the contributions of new generations of developers who have distinct technology-related experiences. We describe our qualitative investigation into how developers, who began regularly using social networking technology at an early age (referred to as precocious users), demonstrate distinct expectations about the goals of software development. We advance a theoretical perspective that explains how the increasingly socially infused nature of networking applications shapes generations of individuals — some of whom will go on to become creative developers in the software industry. Our perspective suggests software organizations can leverage developers who have been precocious users of more recent social networking technologies to reinforce intuitive usage, promote social impact, and re-energize experimentation and contribution to the software community. Our results also offer a comprehensive set of development goals that focus attention towards contemporary expectations about challenging usability and contribution to software ecosystems. We conclude by discussing how our methodological steps, data collection, and data analysis procedures empower future research to explore generational shifts in the career perceptions and competencies of the digital workforce.
Keywords: software development; social networking; generation; digital workforce; digital native; human resource; career perceptions; comparative causal mapping; qualitative study

Estimating Network Effects in Two-Sided Markets - Hinz, Oliver; Otter, Thomas; Skiera, Bernd (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
The proliferation of the Internet has enabled platform intermediaries to create two-sided markets in many industries. Time-series data on the number of customers on both sides of the markets allow platform intermediaries for estimating the direction and magnitude of network effects, which can then support growth predictions and subsequent information technology (IT) or marketing investment decisions. This article investigates the conditions under which this estimation of same-side and cross-side network effects should distinguish between its impact on the number of new customers (i.e., acquisition) and existing customers (i.e., their activity). The authors propose an influx-outflow model for doing so and conduct a simulation study to benchmark the new model against the traditional model. Further they compare the models in an illustrative empirical study in which they study the growth of an Internet auction platform. The results show that this separation of effects is beneficial because the existing customers on both sides of the market can influence the acquisition and dropout of other customers asymmetrically. The paper thus makes an important contribution that should impact the way how researchers and business practitioners measure network effects in two-sided markets.
Keywords: two-sided markets; electronic commerce; online intermediaries; customer churn; customer acquisition; platform economy

Prominence and Engagement: Different Mechanisms Regulating Continuance and Contribution in Online Communities - Kuem, Jungwon; Khansa, Lara; Kim, Sung S (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Online communities have suffered from their members’ intermittent, dormant, or nonexistent participation. We propose that prominence, which refers to the salience of community members’ psychological proximity to their community, differs from the engagement construct, which denotes a psychological dedication to behave prosaically toward other community members. Whereas engagement has been increasingly examined as a driver of online community behavior, the role of prominence has received a minimal amount of attention in the literature. Drawing on self-determination theory, we developed a framework that proposes the prominence construct as a phenomenon distinctive from engagement in its nature, formation, and behavioral outcomes. Our findings based on two studies indicate that the proposed model with prominence performs considerably better than the existing model with only engagement. Our conceptual model contributes to Information Systems research by laying a strong theoretical foundation to differentiate between the behavioral paths of the autonomous prominence construct and its controlled engagement counterpart.
Keywords: Prominence; engagement; online communities; participation continuance; online contribution; autonomy; relatedness; knowledge self-efficacy; self-determination

Impact of Cyberattacks by Malicious Hackers on the Competition in Software Markets - Sen, Ravi; Verma, Ajay; Heim, Gregory R (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
The number of malicious hacking incidents in our increasingly IT-enabled world has been increasing over the years. Conventional wisdom focuses on negative impacts of these malicious hacker activities. We posit that malicious hacker activities also might lead to some unintended consequences, specifically related to altering of software market structure, and associated stakeholder consequences. In this study, we model the competition between two software platforms in the presence of malicious hackers who perform cyberattacks against one or both software platforms. We compare a benchmark case where malicious hackers are either absent, or if present do not target the software platforms, against a first scenario where only one software platform is targeted, and a second scenario where both software platforms are targeted. Interestingly, we find the presence of malicious hackers’ activities is not always detrimental to all software industry stakeholders. In general, the results suggest that the presence of malicious hackers is more likely to result in a competitive market, while their absence is more likely to result in a monopoly. Furthermore, we show that under certain market conditions, the unsecure software platform targeted by hackers potentially can drive its more secure competitor out of the market.
Keywords: software competition; malicious hackers; software markets; cyberattacks; software platforms

Using Design-Science Based Gamification to Improve Organizational Security Training and Compliance - Silic, Mario; Lowry, Paul Benjamin (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
We conducted a design-science research project to improve an organization’s compound problems of (1) unsuccessful employee phishing prevention and (2) poorly received internal security training. To do so, we created a gamified security training system focusing on two factors: (1) enhancing intrinsic motivation through gamification and (2) improving security learning and efficacy. Our key theoretical contribution is proposing a recontextualized kernel theory from the hedonic-motivation system adoption model that can be used to assess employee security constructs along with their intrinsic motivations and coping for learning and compliance. A six-month field study with 420 participants shows that fulfilling users’ motivations and coping needs through gamified security training can result in statistically significant positive behavioral changes. We also provide a novel empirical demonstration of the conceptual importance of “appropriate challenge” in this context. We vet our work using the principles of proof-of-concept and proof-of-value, and we conclude with a research agenda that leads toward final proof-in-use.
Keywords: computer security; gamification; design science research; hedonic motivation; system adoption model; immersion; flow; security compliance; security education; training; awareness; SETA

Mining Semantic Soft Factors for Credit Risk Evaluation in Peer-to-Peer Lending - Wang, Zhao; Jiang, Cuiqing; Zhao, Huimin; Ding, Yong (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
While Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending is rapidly growing, it is also accompanied by high credit risk due to information asymmetry. Besides conventional hard information, soft information also enters into the lending decision process. The descriptive loan texts submitted by borrowers have great potential for exploiting useful soft factors, but also pose great challenges due to the semantic sensitivity to context and the complexity of content representation. We propose a novel text mining method for automatically extracting semantic soft factors from descriptive loan texts. The method maps terms to an embedding space, assembles semantically related terms together into semantic cliques, and then defines semantic soft factors corresponding to the semantic cliques. Empirical evaluation shows that the extracted semantic soft factors contributed to significant improvement on credit risk evaluation in terms of both discrimination performance and granting performance. This work advances our knowledge of soft information indicative of a borrower’s credit risk.
Keywords: P2P lending; descriptive loan text; credit risk evaluation; text mining; soft information; semantic soft factor; online lending

Fostering Value Creation with Digital Platforms: A Unified Theory of the Application Programming Interface Design - Wulf, Jochen; Blohm, Ivo (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
While many firms in recent years have started to offer public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), firms struggle with shaping digital platform strategies that align API design with aspired business goals and the demands of external developers. We address the lack of theory that explains the performance impacts of three API archetypes (professional, mediation, and open asset services). We couple survey data from 152 API product managers with manually coded API design classifications. With this data, we conduct cluster and regression analyses that reveal moderating effects of two value creation strategies (economies of scope in production and innovation) on the relationships between API archetype similarity and two API performance outcomes: return on investment and diffusion. We contribute to IS literature by developing a unifying theory that consolidates different theoretical perspectives on API design, by extending current knowledge on the performance effects of API design, and by empirically studying the distinct circumstances under which digital platforms facilitate economies of scope in production or in innovation. Our results provide practical implications on how API providers can align API archetype choice with the value creation strategy and the API’s business objective.
Keywords: Application programming interface; boundary resource; digital platform; economies of scope; cluster analysis; API design

Temporal Effects of Repeated Recognition and Lack of Recognition on Online Community Contributions - Bhattacharyya, Samadrita; Banerjee, Shankhadeep; Bose, Indranil; Kankanhalli, Atreyi (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
A reason for online communities to confer recognition (e.g., badges) on members is to acknowledge and encourage contributions. Yet, it is unclear whether such recognition or lack of it changes members’ contribution behaviors over time. While anticipated recognition has been found to motivate members’ contributions, past findings are limited regarding members’ post-recognition behaviors. Especially, the impact of multiple recognitions over time remains unexplored. Also, the contribution behavior of deserving, yet unrecognized members lacks investigation, which can help uncover the negative side effects of recognition systems. Motivated by these gaps in understanding, we build on reinforcement theory to propose a positive role of first-time recognition as a social reinforcer of contribution behavior, while repeated recognition is hypothesized to suffer from reinforcer satiation. However, for deserving, yet unrecognized members we propose a decrease in contributions due to recognition inequity. Using quasi-experiments on 81,393 reviewers of one of the largest online business review sites, Yelp.com, we find empirical support for our hypotheses, with contribution effort and quantity as outcomes. Additional analysis with contribution quality as outcome shows differing relationships for repeatedly recognized versus deserving, unrecognized members. Other than its research contributions, this study provides practical insights for designing effective recognition systems for online communities.
Keywords: online communities; online reviews; online contributions; community contribution; community recognition; quasi-experiment; reinforcement theory; reinforcer satiation; recognition inequity; temporal effects

Effect of Crowd Voting on Participation in Crowdsourcing Contests - Chen, Liang; Xu, Pei; Liu, De (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
While expert rating is still a dominant approach for selecting winners in contests for creative works, a few crowdsourcing platforms have recently used “crowd voting” for winner selection – that is, let users of the crowdsourcing community publicly vote for contest winners. We investigate how a contest’s reliance on crowd voting for winner selection, defined as the percentage of crowd-voted prizes to the total prize sum (in dollar amounts), affects contest participation. Drawing upon expectancy theory and tournament theory, we develop a theoretical understanding of this relationship. Using a novel dataset of contests employing both crowd voting and expert rating, we find that a contest’s reliance on crowd voting is positively associated with participation. Specifically, every 10% increase in the crowd-voting reliance can boost users’ odds of participation by about 7%. Moreover, crowd voting is more appealing to users whose expertise is not high and whose status in the crowdsourcing community is high.
Keywords: crowdsourcing; crowdsourcing contests; winner-selection mechanisms; crowd voting; expert rating; expectancy theory; tournament theory

Idea Convergence Quality in Open Innovation Crowdsourcing: A Cognitive Load Perspective - Cheng, Xusen; Fu, Shixuan; de Vreede, Triparna; De Vreede, Gert-Jan; Seeber, Isabella; Maier, Ronald; Weber, Barbara (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Open innovation crowdsourcing enables online crowds to quickly generate a plethora of creative ideas. A key challenge is the convergence of ideas for further consideration from massive numbers of candidate ideas with diverse quality. Based on Cognitive Load Theory, we executed a laboratory experiment to test the associations between three types of cognitive load manipulations and idea convergence outcomes. Our findings show that germane cognitive load positively correlates with idea convergence quality, satisfaction with process, and satisfaction with outcome. Intrinsic cognitive load is negatively associated with satisfaction with process and satisfaction with outcome, while extraneous cognitive load negatively correlates only with satisfaction with outcome. We further identified the positive moderation role of knowledge self-efficacy, perceived goal clarity, and need for cognition on the relationships between germane cognitive load and idea convergence quality. Our findings can inform open innovation organizers when designing tasks and interventions to improve convergence outcomes.
Keywords: cognitive load; idea crowdsourcing; idea convergence; knowledge self-efficacy; goal clarity; open innovation

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Multi-Level Theory for Supplier Participation on Digital Platforms - Kathuria, Abhishek; Karhade, Prasanna P; Konsynski, Benn R (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Digital platforms have transformed various industries, with profound changes witnessed in settings characterized by repeated, low value, and novel transactions, such as ride sharing, household services, and food delivery. Platform providers need to understand the factor(s) that suppliers consider before choosing to participate on their platforms. We argue that multi-level theorizing is necessary to explain the patterns of decision criteria that constitute the complex, yet boundedly-rational decision of platform participation. We draw on multiple theoretical perspectives which include predictors from firm-level strategic behavior, firm-level digital predictors, institutional predictors, and platform level, competition and contextual (environmental) predictors to model restaurant’s decision to participate on food delivery platforms, which are an exemplar of platforms that digitize transactions of ubiquitous and episodic nature. The population of 95,735 restaurants, serving a total of 135 different cuisines, located in the 37 largest cities of India, forms the dataset for developing our multi-level theory. Our decision tree induction methodology, which employs high levels of pruning, empowers us to discover context-specific rules that serve as credible approximations of the partial ordering of decision flows tacitly used by restaurants in deciding to participate on platforms. We identify six combinations of predictors, that is, decision rules, which are situated in at least four theoretical perspectives, to succinctly explain supplier participation on digital platforms. Finally, we abduct away from these specific decision rules to develop generalizable theoretical propositions. The decision trees, context-specific rules, general forms of the rules, and generalized propositions together form our multi-level theory for supplier participation on digital platforms. Our findings aid platform providers identify suppliers who can be the focus of efforts to increase platform participation, and help suppliers identify the participation status of competitors. For policymakers, our findings imply that incentives at the ends of the pricing spectrum can increase supplier participation on digital platforms.
Keywords: digital platforms; multi-level theory; induction; abduction; decision trees; big data; emerging markets; platform growth; platform participation

Effectiveness of Location-Based Advertising and the Impact of Interface Design - Molitor, Dominik; Spann, Martin; Ghose, Anindya; Reichhart, Philipp (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Offline retailers increasingly use location-based coupons to target consumers in their vicinity in real-time. The rationale for the use of location-based coupons is that geographic proximity increases the relevance for consumers and, thus, the effectiveness of these campaigns. Two key interface-specific aspects of location-based coupon applications that influence their effectiveness are 1) the provision of distance information and 2) the distance-based ranking of coupons. The aim of this paper is to study and quantify the impact of these two key aspects of interface design on the effectiveness of location-based coupons. We conduct a randomized field experiment with 399,913 observations, including 3,499 different coupon promotions offered by 3,930 different stores located in 2,392 ZIP code areas in a large Western European country. Our results show that the most effective interface design for location-based coupons is based on a distance-based ranking. Furthermore, we find significant differences in the impact of distance and display rank based on the interface design and the actual geographic location of users. Our results thus contribute to the understanding of consumers’ behavioral responses to location-based advertising and provide important implications for the interface-design of location-based advertising applications.
Keywords: randomized field experiment; mobile pull; mobile push; mobile analytics; behavioral effects; interface design; m-commerce; location-based advertising; mobile advertising

A Novel Recommendation Model for Online-to-Offline Service Based on the Customer Network and Service Location - Pan, Yuchen; Wu, Desheng (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
We propose a new online-to-offline (O2O) service recommendation method based on a novel customer network and service location (CNLRec) in order to help customer to choose the “ideal” O2O services from a large set of alternatives. Our customer network, based on the “co-used” behaviors obtained from the online rating matrix, captures customers’ online behaviors while service location reflects offline behavior characteristic of the customer. For a target customer, a ranking of candidate services based on their locations and this network is generated, in which customer scale usage bias is eliminated. Our experimental results show that: First, even though the rating matrix is sparse, most customers are connected to our proposed customer network, which largely addresses the problem of sparse data. Second, CNLRec outperforms widely-used and state-of-the-art recommendation methods. In addition, e-commerce recommendations that use CNLRec without including item location information (CNRec) has better performance than existing methods. Third, all attributes in CNLRec, including network attributes (relationship degree and customer attribute) and location attributes, play a significant role in recommendations. Specially, O2O service location plays an important role in O2O service selection. In our research, we find the optimal combinations of these attributes.
Keywords: Online-to-offline model; O2O service recommendation; customer network; service location; rating matrix; sparse data

Too Busy to Be Manipulated: How Multitasking with Technology Improves Deception Detection in Collaborative Teamwork - Twyman, Nathan W; Proudfoot, Jeffrey G; Cameron, Ann-Frances; Case, Eric; Burgoon, Judee K; Twitchell, Douglas P (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Deception is an unfortunate staple in group work. Guarding against team members’ deceptive tactics and alternative agendas is difficult and may seem even more difficult in technology-driven business environments that have made multitasking during teamwork increasingly commonplace. This research develops a foundation for a nuanced theoretical understanding of deception detection under these conditions. The intersection of information technology multitasking and deception detection theories is shown to produce various and sometimes competing ideas about how this type of multitasking might affect truthfulness assessments in real-time teamwork. A laboratory study involving a collaborative game helped evaluate the different ideas using manipulated deception and multitasking behaviors in a real-time, virtual group environment. The results provide evidence that information multitasking can actually improve deception detection, likely because multitaskers engage less in the team conversation, making themselves less manipulable. As understanding of multitasking benefits increases, managers and designers can incorporate effective multitasking into collaborative processes.
Keywords: deception detection; multitasking; multicommunicating; group work; performance; StrikeCOM; credibility assessment

Herding and Software Adoption: A Re-Examination Based on Post-Adoption Software Discontinuance - Zhao, Xia; Tian, Jing; Xue, Ling (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Informational cascades are theorized as an underlying mechanism of herding. That is, an individual, having observed the actions of those ahead of him/her, chooses to follow the behavior of the preceding individuals even though his/her private information suggests other options. Empirical identification of informational cascades is challenging because individual users’ private information is unobservable. Our study utilizes a unique data set on post-adoption discontinuance of app usage to revisit herding and informational cascades in software adoption. We find that with the download of apps being controlled, a higher software ranking is associated with more post-adoption discontinuance of app usage, which empirically illustrates the decision deficiency of following others’ observed behavior in adopting popular software apps and supports the theoretical perspective of informational cascades. We further show that the association between app ranking and post-adoption discontinuance is stronger for apps with higher ratings and with higher complexity levels. Moreover, as apps become more complex in the app life cycle, updated app versions with a higher level of complexity are associated with a weaker relationship between app ranking and post-adoption discontinuance. Our study contributes to the literature by confirming the informational cascades effect and its interaction with other informational mechanisms (e.g., user rating) and software internal feature (e.g., product complexity) in software adoption. The findings help software vendors gain insights in users’ herding behavior in software adoption and optimize their software releasing strategies and promotional effort allocation.
Keywords: herding; software adoption; software discontinuance; informational cascades; software ranking; online rating; software complexity; behavioral herding

Human Identification for Activities of Daily Living: A Deep Transfer Learning Approach - Zhu, Hongyi; Samtani, Sagar; Chen, Hsinchun; Nunamaker, Jay F (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Sensor-based home Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) monitoring systems have emerged to monitor elderly people’s self-care ability remotely. However, the unobtrusive, privacy-friendly object motion sensor-based systems face challenges such as scarce labeled data and ADL performer confusion in a multi-resident setting. This study adopts the design science paradigm to develop an innovative deep transfer learning framework for human identification (DTL-HID) to address both challenges. A novel convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to automatically extract comprehensive temporal and cross-axial motion patterns for the DTL-HID framework. We rigorously evaluate the DTL-HID framework against state-of-the-art benchmarks (e.g., k Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines, and alternative CNN designs). Results demonstrate our proposed DTL-HID framework can identify the ADL performer accurately even on a small amount of labeled data. We demonstrate a case study and discuss how stakeholders can further apply this approach to unobtrusive smart home monitoring for senior citizens. Beyond demonstrating the framework’s practical utility, we discuss two implications of our design principles to mobile analytics and design science research: (1) extracting temporal and axial local dependencies can capture richer information from multi-axial time-series data and (2) transferring knowledge learned on a relevant source domain with sufficient data can improve the performance of the desired task on the target domain with scarce data.
Keywords: Deep transfer learning; human identification; activities of daily living; deep learning; mobile health; design science; health monitoring

Decision Problems in Blockchain Governance: Old Wine in New Bottles or Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes? - Ziolkowski, Rafael; Miscione, Gianluca; Schwabe, Gerhard (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Blockchain comes with the promise of being a disruptive technology with the potential for novel ways of interaction in a wide range of applications. Following broader application, scholarly interest in the technology is growing, though an extensive analysis of blockchain applications from a governance perspective is lacking to date. This research pays special attention to the governance of blockchain systems and illustrates decision problems in 14 blockchain systems from four application domains. Based on academic literature, semi-structured interviews with representatives from those organizations, and content analysis of grey literature, common problems in blockchain governance have been singled out and contextualized. Studying their enactment revealed their relevance to major organizational theories in what we labelled “Patrolling the borders,” “External Legitimation,” “Reduction of Discretionality,” and “Temporal Management.” The identification of these problems enriches the scarce body of knowledge on the governance of blockchain systems, resulting in a better understanding of how blockchain governance links to existing concepts and how it is enacted in practice.
Keywords: Blockchain governance; decision-making in blockchain systems; blockchain; distributed governance

Drivers of Supplier Participation in Ride-Hailing Platforms - Hong, Soo Jeong; Bauer, Johannes M; Lee, Kwangjin; Granados, Nelson F (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Ride-hailing platforms such as Uber offer service suppliers more flexible work conditions but lower security than permanent jobs. This study examines the preferences of ride-hailing drivers when they are offered contract and platform design options related to flexibility, financial security, and information features. The sample design and the discrete choice experiment approach we use permit the exploration of differences in the preferences of sub-groups of suppliers, including active and inactive drivers, drivers with and without other jobs, and those who multi-home. We find that the utility and willingness of drivers to work for ride-hailing platforms generally increase when the ride-hailing company provides a minimum wage guarantee, a company-sponsored benefit plan, and information features that protect drivers’ privacy and allow them to screen for undesired passengers. These attributes are important enough for drivers so that they are willing to sacrifice scheduling flexibility by committing to minimum working hours in exchange for those attributes. We identified significant heterogeneity in driver preferences. For drivers with a primary job or jobs other than ride-hailing, the perception of working conditions in the primary job affects their willingness to restart ride-hailing services. Preferences also vary depending on whether a driver participates in one or more platforms. These results suggest that offering a menu of contract options could provide novel tools for ride-hailing companies to improve the stability and predictability of supply. It may also alleviate some of the concerns about driver working conditions that have led to increasing calls for the regulation of ride-hailing services to protect drivers.
Keywords: Choice experiment; financial security; job flexibility; information transparency; Lyft; platform economy; ride-hailing; sharing economy; Uber

How to Market Smart Products: Design and Pricing for Sharing Markets - Weber, Thomas A (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
This paper introduces joint product design and non-linear pricing in the context of sharing markets. Product ecosystems enable user sensing, setting the stage for the control of post-purchase consumption patterns. By varying the degree to which products can be reused and transferred among peers, a company can engineer their shareability, which together with a capacity of aftermarket control, allows for flexible non-linear pricing that involves charging for the initial purchase and for subsequent collaborative transfers separately. Using a dynamic model with heterogeneous consumers and asymmetric information, we analyze a firm’s economic strategy, including ecosystem design and flexible pricing, for long-term profitability. We show that an optimal product design balances durability-driven demand and price effects. Furthermore, for any given product design a profit-maximizing non-linear pricing schedule features retail price and sharing tariff in a robustly quadratic relationship, independent of the specifics of the consumer distribution. Various extensions, relating to the interaction of the firm’s policy with a sharing market and the possibility of time-varying sales distributions, are also considered.
Keywords: aftermarket control; collaborative consumption; durability design; non-linear pricing; product ecosystems; sharing economy; smart products; product design; product pricing

Understanding Security Vulnerability Awareness, Firm Incentives, and ICT Development in Pan-Asia - Zhuang, Yunhui; Choi, Yunsik; He, Shu; Leung, Alvin Chung Man; Lee, Gene Moo; Whinston, Andrew (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
This paper investigates how the awareness of a security vulnerability index affects firms’ security protection strategy and how the information awareness effect interacts with firm incentives and country-wide information technology (IT) development level. The security index is constructed based on outgoing spams and phishing website hosting, which may serve as an indicator of a firm’s security controls. To study whether security vulnerability awareness causes firms to improve their security, we conducted a randomized field experiment on 1,262 firms in six Pan-Asian countries and regions. Among 631 randomly selected treated firms, we alerted them of their security vulnerability index and their relative rankings compared to their peers via advisory emails and websites. Difference-in-differences analyses show that compared with the controls, the treated firms improve their security over time, with a statistically significant reduction of outgoing spam volume according to one of the data sources but not phishing website hosting. However, a statistically significant reduction in phishing website hosting was observed among non-web hosting firms, suggesting that firms’ underlying incentives play an important role in the treatment effect. Lastly, exploiting the multi-country nature of the data, we found that firms in countries with high information and communications technology (ICT) development are more responsive to our intervention because they have higher IT capabilities and more resources to resolve security issues. Our study provides cybersecurity policymakers with useful insights on how firm incentives and ICT environments play roles in firms’ security measure adoption.
Keywords: cybersecurity; information security index; randomized field experiment; security awareness; firm incentives; ICT development; Pan-Asia

Semi-Supervised Cyber Threat Identification in Dark Net Markets: A Transductive and Deep Learning Approach - Ebrahimi, Mohammadreza; Nunamaker, Jay F; Chen, Hsinchun (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Dark Net Marketplaces (DNMs), online selling platforms on the dark web, constitute a major component of the underground economy. Due to the anonymity and increasing accessibility of these platforms, they are rich sources of cyber threats such as hacking tools, data breaches, and personal account information. As the number of products offered on DNMs increases, researchers have begun to develop automated machine learning-based threat identification approaches. A major challenge in adopting such an approach is that the task typically requires manually labeled training data, which is expensive and impractical. We propose a novel semi-supervised labeling technique for leveraging unlabeled data based on the lexical and structural characteristics of DNMs using transductive learning. Empirical results show that the proposed approach leads to an approximately 3-5% increase in classification performance measured by F1-score, while increasing both precision and recall. To further improve the identification performance, we adopt Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) as a deep learning structure on top of the proposed labeling method. The results are evaluated against a large collection of 79K product listings obtained from the most popular DNMs. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in threat identification and is considered as an important step toward lowering the human supervision cost in realizing automated threat detection within cyber threat intelligence organizations.
Keywords: Dark net marketplaces; cyber threats; semi-supervised labeling; transductive learning; deep learning; long short-term memory; threat detection

The Effectiveness of Abstract Versus Concrete Fear Appeals in Information Security - Schuetz, Sebastian W; Benjamin Lowry, Paul; Pienta, Daniel A; Bennett Thatcher, Jason (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Information security (ISec) is a pervasive concern of individuals, organizations, and governments. To encourage individuals to engage in and learn about secure behaviors, ISec research has turned to fear appeals, which are short messages that communicate threats and efficacy to elicit protection motivation among recipients. ISec research has reported contradictory findings on what makes fear appeals effective in ISec contexts, and this lack of clarity is problematic, because it may lead to incorrect conclusions. For example, some studies have argued that the mixed findings arise from differences between personal and organizational contexts and that fear appeals do not work well among organizational users. However, this argument has not been empirically tested, and differences in message design provide an equally plausible explanation, which has also not been tested. To reconcile the mixed findings across these studies, we test the effects of context (i.e., personal users vs. organizational users) and degree of message abstractness (i.e., abstract vs. concrete) on fear-appeal outcomes. We draw from construal-level theory to conceptualize the differences between abstract and concrete fear appeals. Across three experiments, we find evidence that concrete fear appeals are more effective than abstract fear appeals for the purpose of stimulating fear-appeal outcomes. Furthermore, by comparing two identical experiments—one conducted with personal users and another conducted with organizational users—we find differences in participants’ responses to fear appeals. However, contrary to our expectations, our findings suggest that organizational users report higher levels of fear and protection motivation than personal users. This finding is not a theoretical contradiction: the theoretical crux of an effective fear appeal is that it must be personally relevant to stimulate fear; correspondingly, we show that concrete fear appeals help stimulate fear and the desired protective response. Moreover, concrete fear appeals increase actual compliance behaviors, not just intentions. Thus, our findings suggest that the mixed findings in the literature may be a product of message abstractness and differences among audiences. This has pivotal implications for how to construct fear appeals in research and practice.
Keywords: Information security threats; fear appeals; protection motivation theory; construal-level theory; cybersecurity; secure behaviors

Centralized IT Decision Making and Cybersecurity Breaches: Evidence from U.S. Higher Education Institutions - Liu, Che-Wei; Huang, Peng; Lucas, Henry C (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Despite the consensus that information security should become an important consideration in information technology (IT) governance rather than the sole responsibility of the IT department, important IT governance decisions are often made on the basis of fulfilling business needs with a minimal amount of attention paid to their implications for information security. We study how an important IT governance mechanism—the degree of centralized decision making—affects the likelihood of cybersecurity breaches. Examining a sample of 504 U.S. higher-education institutions over a four-year period, we find that a university with centralized IT governance is associated with fewer breaches. Interestingly, the effect of centralized IT governance is contingent on the heterogeneity of a university’s computing environment: Universities with more heterogeneous IT infrastructure benefit more from centralized IT decision making. In addition, we find the relationship between centralized governance and cybersecurity breaches is most pronounced in public universities and those with more intensive research activities. Collectively, these findings highlight the tradeoff between granting autonomy and flexibility in the use of information systems and enforcing standardized, organization-wide security protocols.
Keywords: information security; cybersecurity breach; IT governance; centralized decision making; IT heterogeneity; IT centralization

The Relative Effect of the Convergence of Product Recommendations from Various Online Sources - Xu, Jingjun (David); Benbasat, Izak; Cenfetelli, Ronald T (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Most previous studies about online product recommendation sources (recommendation agents [RAs], consumers, and experts) have been limited to the evaluation by a single source on a website. Thus, the relative influence of convergent recommendations from different sources on consumers’ acceptance of the advice remains largely unknown. We draw upon and extend the product uncertainty model to theorize how the convergence of recommendations from various sources differentially influences customers’ acceptance of recommendations. Our experiments show that the recommendation convergence between RAs and experts leads to the greater recommendation acceptance of the jointly recommended products than the convergence between experts and consumers or convergence between RAs and consumers. The rationale is that RAs best reduce fit uncertainty, and experts best reduce description and performance uncertainties. Experts and RAs complement each other by reducing all three dimensions of product uncertainty. Online merchants are advised to incorporate multiple sources into their websites, including sources (i.e., RAs and experts) that play complementary roles in reducing product uncertainty.
Keywords: Online product uncertainty; description uncertainty; fit uncertainty; performance uncertainty; recommendation sources; online recommenders; convergent recommendations

Ambivalence and Coping Responses in Post-Adoptive Information Systems Use - Qahri-Saremi, Hamed; Turel, Ofir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
As information systems (IS) have evolved, more sophisticated meshing of their positive and negative implications has emerged, leaving users with an increasingly ambivalent experience. Given the discomfort of ambivalence, users intrinsically engage in coping responses with different degrees of cognitive flexibility. This paper investigates ambivalence and the coping responses users adopt in the context of post-adoptive IS use via two research questions: (1) what are the consequences of flexible and inflexible coping responses to ambivalence toward post-adoptive IS use? and (2) how does personality influence a user’s disposition toward flexible and inflexible coping responses to ambivalence toward post-adoptive IS use? To address them, we propose and test a research model using a multimethod design, comprising two complementary empirical studies. Study 1 adopts a variable-centered approach to test the hypotheses and to empirically validate the proposed research model. Building on the findings of Study 1, Study 2 employs a person-centered approach to identify a typology of IS users. The findings demonstrate the prevalence of ambivalence among IS users, the dual-nature of their coping responses to ambivalence, in part, influenced by their level of neuroticism, and the associated post-adoptive IS use behaviors. This paper provides a novel perspective to users’ attitudes toward an IS use and resolves some of the tensions in prior ambivalence research.
Keywords: Ambivalence; IS use; IS post-adoption; coping responses; cognitive flexibility; neuroticism; social networking sites; user profiles

Design Principles for Signal Detection in Modern Job Application Systems: Identifying Fabricated Qualifications - Twyman, Nathan W; Pentland, Steven J; Spitzley, Lee (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
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 provide initial evidence that SIGHT systems can elicit and capture qualification signals beyond what can be traditionally obtained from a typical application and that SIGHT systems can assess signals more effectively than unaided decision-making. SIGHT principles may extend to domains such as audit and security interviews.
Keywords: signaling theory; job-application assessment; behavioral assessment; automated interviewing; virtual-agent-based interviewing; deception detection; human-risk assessment; NeuroIS; design science

The impact of chatbot conversational skill on engagement and perceived humanness - Schuetzler, Ryan M; Grimes, G Mark; Scott Giboney, Justin (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Conversational agents (CAs)—frequently operationalized as chatbots—are computer systems that leverage natural language processing to engage in conversations with human users. CAs are often operationalized as chatbots which are used for many applications including technical support, customer service, and digital personal assistants. Despite their widespread use, little research to date has investigated how improving the conversational skill of a CA impacts user perceptions of the agent. To elucidate this relationship, this research uses Social Presence Theory to describe how conversational skill influences perceived social presence and ultimately anthropomorphism of a chatbot. We conducted a series of studies in which 450 participants interacted with CAs exhibiting varying levels of conversational skill. We show that people perceive a more skilled CA to be more socially present and anthropomorphic than a less skilled CA. This research advances the knowledge of computer-human interface in information systems, as CA research to date has largely focused on the technical challenges rather than the behavioral questions of how users interact with CAs.
Keywords: Conversational agents; system humanness; anthropomorphism; user engagement; social presence; chatbots

Idea Generation in Enterprise Social Media: Open versus Closed Groups and Their Network Structures - Van Osch, Wietske; Bulgurcu, Burcu (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Social network theory has produced conflicting results regarding the link between different social network structures—bridging versus bonding—and idea generation. To address this conundrum, we conduct a naturally occurring quasi-experiment of 126 open and 108 closed groups within an Enterprise Social Media (ESM) system of a multinational enterprise. Our findings show that idea generation occurs when the type of social network structure—bridging or bonding—is matched to a group’s openness or closedness, respectively. We further show that the reverse is counterproductive: when closed groups display bridging ties and open groups display bonding ties, idea generation is significantly undermined. Theoretically, these findings clarify the conditions and mechanisms by which both bridging and bonding can result in idea generation and provide a deeper understanding of the use of ESM for idea generation. Practically, our findings provide valuable and actionable insights regarding the use of ESM for idea generation in groups.
Keywords: idea generation; enterprise social media; group openness; group closedness; social networks; network bonding; network bridging; group-level analysis

Signal or Noise in Social Media Discussions: The Role of Network Cohesion in Predicting the Bitcoin Market - Xie, Peng; Chen, Hailiang; Hu, Yu Jeffrey (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Prior studies have shown that social media discussions can be helpful in predicting price movements in financial markets. With the increasingly large amount of social media data, how to effectively distinguish value-relevant information from noise remains an important question. We study this question by investigating the role of network cohesion in the relationship between social media sentiment and price changes in the Bitcoin market. As network cohesion is associated with information correlation within the discussion network, we hypothesize that less cohesive social media discussion networks are better at predicting the next-day returns than more cohesive networks. Both regression analyses and trading simulations based on data collected from Bitcointalk.org confirm our hypothesis. Our findings enrich the literature on the role of social media in financial markets and provide actionable insights for investors to trade based on social media signals.
Keywords: social media analytics; network cohesion; financial technology; bitcoin; fintech

Effect of Release Timing of App Innovations based on Mobile Platform Innovations - Soh, Franck; Grover, Varun (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
This study focuses on app innovations based on mobile platform innovations (MPIs), examining how app developers can time the app innovations release to best leverage MPIs and increase app financial performance. We suggest that the performance is contingent on the adoption curve of mobile platform generations and the level of backward compatibility of the MPIs. We find support for our hypotheses after analyzing 1,213 MPI-based app innovations on the iOS mobile platform ecosystem. The main theoretical contribution of this study, supported empirically, is to better understand the role of the platform generation adoption curve and MPIs’ level of backward compatibility in the assessment of the effect of MPI-based app innovation release timing on complementor’s performance. We encourage third-party developers to create MPI-based app innovations more prominently and release them early during the growth stage of the adoption curve while prioritizing MPIs with no backward compatibility.
Keywords: Mobile platforms; innovation; release timing; backward compatibility; adoption curve; app releases; online innovations; platform ecosystems

Vertical Integration and Zero-Rating Interplay: An Economic Analysis of Ad-Supported and Ad-Free Digital Content - Cho, Soohyun; Qiu, Liangfei; Bandyopadhyay, Subhajyoti (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
We discuss the economic impacts of the interplay between vertical integration and zero-rating for digital content. To this end, we develop a game-theoretic model that involves an Internet Service Provider (ISP), two competing content providers (CPs)—one an ad-supported CP, the other ad-free—and consumers. While previous studies have separately examined vertical integration and zero-rated content, none to our knowledge has explored the simultaneous interaction of both phenomena, which became apparent after the historic merger of AT&T and Time Warner. This vertical integration of an ISP and a CP has sparked an intense debate among policymakers and practitioners alike over the economic implications and consequent business practices (e.g., zero-rated content). The results of our analysis show that an ISP can generate higher profits after the merger with zero-rated content. Surprisingly, we find that the consumer valuation of the ad-free content significantly affects how the ISP will decide to maximize its profit. We extend our model to additionally consider the CPs’ partial sponsorship of their consumers’ data usage as well as the ISP’s different pricing schemes for its consumers and the CPs. Our analysis, which illustrates the various arrangements between vertical integration and zero-rated content, and our findings on consumer surplus and social welfare should be helpful to policymakers as well as to the ISPs, CPs, and consumers of digital content.
Keywords: vertical integration; zero rating; game-theoretic model; Internet service provider; ISP; content provider; ad-supported content; ad-free content

Trust Change in Information Technology Products - McKnight, D Harrison; Liu, Peng; Pentland, Brian T (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
We examine why trust change occurs when potential users first encounter news about a specific technology. We propose personal perceptions and three cognitive outcomes—attention, sensemaking, and threshold—affect trust change in educated young adults surveyed regarding a technology product. We find the outcomes of attention, sensemaking, and threshold positively affect trust change, while most hypothesized personal perceptions of the technology (e.g., reputation) do not predict trust change. For research, this implies scholars should focus more on cognitive outcomes of mental news brief processing than on technology perceptions. Our results also imply that research should examine other key dependent variables the way we studied trust change (e.g., “intention-to-use change”—to produce a more dynamic picture of how people adopt a technology). For practice, our data imply that tech companies can counter initial bad news about a technology by quickly providing strong positive news items to repair trust in that technology.
Keywords: Trust change; trust in technology; initial trust; trust repair; cognitive attention; sensemaking; threshold; event; fragile; robust

The Gender Bias Tug-of-War in a Co-creation Community: Core-Periphery Tension on Wikipedia - Young, Amber G; Wigdor, Ariel D; Kane, Gerald C (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Commitment to a neutral point of view is a pillar of Wikipedia culture. Despite a strong culture, the open nature of the community presents challenges for cultural assimilation. Central contributors who make up the community’s core engage in activism to combat traditional forms of bias. However, peripheral contributors may not adopt or adhere to the community’s cultural values and may reflect the very bias the community attempts to combat. These differences create tensions between central and peripheral contributors. Peripheral contributors are likely to contribute traditional types of information bias (e.g., bias against women). In response, central contributors may overcorrect in ways that reverse traditional biases. We compare gender bias on female and male CEO profiles and find evidence of bias that advantages women and disadvantages men. While peripheral contributors may dominate early in the life cycle of core-periphery structured open collaboration communities—due to the volume of contributions—the core dominates in the long term through sustained, systematic activism. Our results suggest that a balance of activity from central and peripheral contributors results in content with the most neutral point of view.
Keywords: Online collaboration communities; digital co-production; core-periphery structure; digital collaboration; knowledge co-creation; gender bias; Wikipedia; CEO; online engagement; Wikipedia neutrality

Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Improve the Quality of Answers in Online Question-answering Health Forums - Mousavi, Reza; Raghu, TS; Frey, Keith (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Quality of answers in health-related community-based question answering (HCQA) forums has been a concern for both users and forum administrators. We conducted a two-phase study to better understand the quality of answers in HCQA forums. First, we employed machine learning to examine the quality of health content. We validated our algorithmic quality ratings by comparing them with those of two physicians. Second, using data from Yahoo! Answers Health section, we examined the effect of the quality of the first answer on the quality of the subsequent answers. Our results suggest that the quality of the subsequent answers is impacted by the quality of the first displayed answer. We further show that the impact of the first displayed answer is larger when the answerers are more familiar with the forum but smaller when the forum provides tips for answering questions. Our study helps HCQA forums to improve the overall quality of answers by 1- creating an algorithmic solution that reliably measures the quality of answers, and 2- adjusting the order of existing answers to encourage higher quality subsequent answers. Our findings also extend the applicability of the order effect to online forums and provide evidence that experienced users would be more influenced by the order effect in such forums.
Keywords: Healthcare information systems; online communities; Q&A forums; machine learning; text mining; natural language processing (NLP); BERT; deep learning; hierarchical topic modeling; objectivity analysis; classifiers; online forums

Can “Gold Medal” Online Sellers Earn Gold? The Impact of Reputation Badges on Sales - Cheng, Hsing Kenneth; Fan, Weiguo; Guo, Peipei; Huang, Hailiang; Qiu, Liangfei (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Reputation systems have been an important component for improvement of online markets’ efficiency by reducing uncertainty about the quality of the sellers. Most, if not all, reputation systems examined in the extant literature reflect the sellers’ long-term accumulative reputation, which has several drawbacks that impede accomplishing the intended goals of the reputation systems. Taobao.com, the largest consumer-to-consumer online market in China, implemented the Gold Medal Seller (GMS) program as a concurrent reputation mechanism to enhance its existing long-term accumulative reputation system. The GMS program presents a backdrop that allows us to address several intriguing research issues not empirically examined in prior literature. By adopting multiple causal identification strategies, we find that earning a reputation badge has a positive impact on sales, and losing a reputation badge has a negative impact on sales. More importantly, the signaling value of obtaining/losing a reputation badge is asymmetric: The magnitude of the effect of losing a reputation badge is four times larger than that of earning a badge. Moreover, consecutively keeping a reputation badge or earning it multiple times is a stronger signal for seller quality and has a larger positive impact on sales, which suggests that the marginal value of reputation badges increases. Our findings offer a new and deeper understanding of the reputation system mechanism design.
Keywords: Reputation system; online markets; signaling; countersignaling; reputations badges

Open to Your Rival: Competition between Open Source and Proprietary Software under Indirect Network Effects - Wang, Yu; Chen, Yu; Koo, Bonwoo (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
With the popularity of open source software (OSS) as an alternative to proprietary software (PS), proprietary-software firms such as IBM and Microsoft started to embrace this new paradigm during the past decades. We analyze how firms choose the software development strategy between OSS and PS, by constructing a duopoly model in which consumers sequentially purchase software and complementary services in a market that exhibits an indirect network effect. We show that a PS firm may benefit from the presence of an OSS firm, and the software market can be dominated by a single OSS if the indirect network effect is weak and the cost saving effect of OSS is negligible. We also show that the market can support two OSS if the cost saving effect of OSS is sizeable, and two PS if firms can provide fully compatible services to competitor’s PS. Building upon the existing works that investigate the competition between PS and OSS, this study improves our understanding of the role of OSS in firm’s software development strategy and market equilibrium.
Keywords: open source software; indirect network effect; software development; complementary services; Hotelling model

The Relative Role of Digital Complementary Assets and Regulation in Discontinuous Telemedicine Innovation in European Hospitals - Steinhauser, Stefanie; Doblinger, Claudia; Hüsig, Stefan (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Telemedicine innovation is important for accelerating the digital transformation of the health care sector. However, telemedicine is a discontinuous digital innovation, and incumbent health care organizations are lagging in its adoption. We combine research on IT innovation adoption and discontinuous innovation to study the relative role of two drivers of discontinuous innovation adoption: digital complementary assets and the regulatory environment. Our findings from 1,753 acute care hospitals across 30 European countries suggest that digital complementary assets have a stronger effect on telemedicine innovation adoption than the regulatory framework. In addition, we observe application- and business model-specific differences. Overall, our findings add the role of organizational versus regulatory drivers of discontinuous innovation adoption to information systems research, emphasize the importance of digital complementary assets for the adoption of discontinuous innovation by incumbent organizations, and provide new insights into how the diffusion of telemedicine innovation can be accelerated.
Keywords: Digital complementary assets; regulation; digital transformation; digital innovations; discontinuous innovations; health care; innovation adoption; telemedicine

Controlling Technical Debt Remediation in Outsourced Enterprise Systems Maintenance: An Empirical Analysis - Ramasubbu, Narayan; Kemerer, Chris F (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Technical debt refers to maintenance obligations that stem from violations of established standards during the development and subsequent maintenance of enterprise systems. Technical debt remediation is particularly challenging in the outsourcing context due to information asymmetry between client and vendor teams. Control balancing—the periodic adjustments to the control configurations of outsourced projects—has been proposed as a process to help mitigate these information asymmetry challenges. Using data collected from 1,824 real-world projects, we tested to what extent control balancing improves the remediation of technical debt. After controlling for a number of technical and environmental factors, including system size, system lifespan, and contract parameters, we find that control balancing can benefit technical debt remediation, but primarily when processes for migrating technical debt-laden systems to new technological platforms have been identified. We highlight the role of technical debt in influencing the effects of relational flexibility in inter-firm engagements.
Keywords: Technical debt; control balancing; project controls; software maintenance; enterprise systems; IT outsourcing; software project management

How Firms Make Information Technology Investment Decisions: Toward a Behavioral Agency Theory - Dong, John Qi; Karhade, Prasanna P; Rai, Arun; Xu, Sean Xin (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
While prior research has established that information technology (IT) investment has a significant impact on firm performance, relatively few studies have provided insights into the antecedents of IT investment decisions. By integrating the behavioral theory of the firm and agency theory, we propose a behavioral agency theory to explain performance shortfalls and corporate governance, which monitors and controls managers’ tendency of overinvestment or underinvestment in IT, as key drivers that jointly determine IT investment. As such, IT investment facilitates a firm’s problemistic search that generates innovation in response to performance gaps. We further examine the role of innovation outputs as a mediating mechanism linking IT investment to firm performance. Our econometric analysis of a large-scale panel dataset provides empirical evidence corroborating our theory. Overall, this study contributes a behavioral agency theory to deepen our understanding about performance drivers and outcomes of IT investment decisions.
Keywords: IT investment; technological choices; performance shortfalls; corporate governance; digital innovation; behavioral theory of the firm; agency theory; behavioral agency theory

Impact of Incentive Mechanism in Online Referral Programs: Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments - Jung, Jaehwuen; Bapna, Ravi; Gupta, Alok; Sen, Soumya (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Despite the growing popularity of online referral programs, a minimal amount is known regarding the theoretical foundations that drive the key actions associated with successful referrals. In this paper, we study which type of referral reward structure is most effective in maximizing word-of-mouth by conducting two randomized experiments in mobile gaming context. Specifically, we examine the effect of three incentive schemes: selfish reward (inviter gets all the reward), equal-split reward (50-50 split), and generous reward (invitee gets all the reward). Consistent across the two experiments, we find that pro-social referral incentive schemes, namely the equal-split and generous schemes, tend to dominate purely selfish schemes in creating WOM. Our mechanism-level analysis shows that both equal-split and generous schemes result in higher number of conversions by significantly increasing the invitee’s likelihood to accept referrals, which we further show that is partially due to selective and better targeted referrals. Our results contribute to the understanding of the optimal design of online referral programs and provide important implications for designing effective referral reward schemes in the digital world.
Keywords: Social contagion; viral marketing; referral incentives; eWOM; online referrals; online incentives; mechanism design

Mitigating the Adverse Effect of Monetary Incentives on Voluntary Contributions Online - Qiao, Dandan; Lee, Shun-Yang; Whinston, Andrew B; Wei, Qiang (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Numerous online information systems (e.g., question and answer [Q&A] forums, citizen science communities, and review websites) rely heavily on volunteer contributions. Managers have used monetary incentives to induce individuals to increase their contribution level. However, monetary incentives could also generate adverse effects, which could dampen individuals’ intrinsic motivation and lead to lower contribution quality when incentives are small. To address this issue, we propose two intervention strategies, goal-setting and challenge-seeking, and conduct a series of randomized experiments. We find that small monetary incentives, when combined with the appropriate intervention strategies, can motivate users to increase contribution quantity while simultaneously sustaining high quality. Thus, integrating such intervention strategies with small incentives can be a cost-effective way to encourage voluntary contributions. Our research contributes to the literature on incentive provision and provides theoretical and practical implications for platforms relying on voluntary contributions.
Keywords: Co-creation; online incentives; intrinsic motivation; extrinsic motivation; altruism; monetary incentives; goal-setting; challenge-seeking; user-generated content; UGC

How Information and Communication Technology Shapes the Influence of Culture on Innovation: A Country-level Analysis - Saldanha, Terence JV; John-Mariadoss, Babu; Wu, Michelle Xiao; Mithas, Sunil (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the distributed nature of innovation in a culturally heterogeneous world raise an important question about how ICT and culture jointly influence innovation. We argue that ICT shapes the influence of culture dimensions on national innovation in nuanced ways, depending on the nature of the dimensions. In particular, cultural dimensions that pertain to norms, formality, and structure (e.g., power distance and uncertainty avoidance) are often considered detrimental to innovation, whereas culture dimensions that pertain to the pursuit of goals and achievement (e.g., individualism, masculinity, and long-term orientation) are often considered conducive for innovation. We hypothesize that ICT amplifies the positive effects of individualism, masculinity, and long-term orientation on national innovation—and, attenuates the negative effects of power distance and uncertainty avoidance on national innovation. Our analyses of data on 66 countries from 2007 to 2015 broadly support our hypotheses about ICT amplifying the positive effects of individualism and long-term orientation, as well as our hypotheses about ICT attenuating the negative effects of power distance and uncertainty avoidance on national innovation. The findings suggest that ICT amplifies the effects of culture dimensions related to the pursuit of goals and helps overcome barriers to innovation that arise from a culture’s focus on norms, formality, and structure. In turn, these findings can help managers and policy makers to make judicious decisions regarding ICT investments to transcend or leverage the country’s cultural characteristics for innovation.
Keywords: National innovation; patents; ICT; national culture; country-level study; World Values Survey; GLOBE; cultural dimensions; information technology investment; innovation

The Empowering and Competition Effects of the Platform-Based Sharing Economy on the Supply and Demand Sides of the Labor Market - Li, Ziru; Hong, Yili; Zhang, Zhongju (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
The sharing economy has fundamentally changed the way many individuals work. In this paper, we study the impact of the entry of a major ridesharing platform into U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), on the supply and demand sides of the labor market. Leveraging the difference-in-differences (DID) research design and a data set combining multiple U.S. Census archival sources, we exploit the variation in labor market metrics before and after Uber’s entry into the MSAs. Our empirical findings reveal that the introduction of the ridesharing platform has an empowering effect on workers (the supply side of the labor market) and a competition effect on traditional jobs (the demand side of the labor market). Specifically, Uber’s entry into the MSAs increases labor force participation, decreases the unemployment rate of residents living below the poverty level, and improves the employment and financial status of low-income workers. In addition, Uber’s entry reduces the employment number and increases wages of conventional low-skill and/or low-wage jobs. This paper provides empirical evidence of the impact of a digital sharing economy platform on the labor market and suggests that policymakers and platform operators should account for this broader impact when they devise policies and make strategic decisions.
Keywords: Sharing economy; labor market; two-sided platforms; empowering effect; competition effect; ridesharing platforms; market entry; traditional jobs; low-wage jobs

Unveiling the Hidden Truth of Drug Addiction: A Social Media Approach Using Similarity Network-Based Deep Learning - Xie, Jiaheng; Zhang, Zhu; Liu, Xiao; Zeng, Daniel (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Opioid use disorder (OUD) is an epidemic that costs the U.S. healthcare systems $504 billion annually and poses grave mortality risks. Existing studies investigated OUD treatment barriers via surveys as a means to mitigate this opioid crisis. However, the response rate of these surveys is low due to social stigma around opioids. We explore user-generated content in social media as a new data source to study OUD. We design a novel IT system, SImilarity Network-based DEep Learning (SINDEL), to discover OUD treatment barriers from patient narratives and address the challenge of morphs. SINDEL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art NLP models, reaching an F1 score of 76.79 percent. Thirteen types of treatment barriers were identified and verified by domain experts. This work contributes to information systems with a novel deep-learning-based approach for text analytics and generalized design principles for social media analytics methods. We also unveil the hurdles patients endure during the opioid epidemic.
Keywords: Computational design science; deep learning; social media analytics; health IT; HealthTech; opioid addiction; addiction treatment

The Effectiveness of Social Norms in Fighting Fake News on Social Media - Gimpel, Henner; Heger, Sebastian; Olenberger, Christian; Utz, Lena (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Fake news poses a substantial threat to society, with serious negative consequences. Therefore, we investigate how people can be encouraged to report fake news and support social media platform providers in their actions against misinformation. Based on social psychology, we hypothesize that social norms encourage social media users to report fake news. In two experiments, we present participants a news feed which contains multiple real and fake news stories while at the same time exposing them to injunctive and descriptive social norm messages. Injunctive social norms describe what behavior most people approve or disapprove. Descriptive social norms refer to what other people do in certain situations. The results reveal, among other things, that highlighting the socially desired behavior of reporting fake news using an injunctive social norm leads to higher reporting rates for fake news. In contrast, descriptive social norms do not have such an effect. Additionally, we observe that the combined application of injunctive and descriptive social norms results in the most substantial reporting behavior improvement. Thus, social norms are a promising socio-technical remedy against fake news.
Keywords: Fake news; social norms; online reporting behavior; social media; injunctive norms; descriptive norms

The Roles of IT Strategies and Security Investments in Reducing Organizational Security Breaches - Li, He; Yoo, Sungjin; Kettinger, William J (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
This research examines the joint effects of information technology (IT) strategies and security investments on organizational security breaches. We focus on two forms of IT strategies: digitalization and embeddedness in IT outsourcing networks. Our longitudinal analysis of U.S. hospitals demonstrates that IT security investments reduce security breaches in less digitalized organizations but increase security breaches for highly digitalized organizations. Investing in technical network control security systems such as anti-virus and intrusion detection systems reduces external breaches. Implementing identity and access management security systems such as biometric scanning and user authentication decreases internal breaches but increases external breaches. However, organizations’ embeddedness in IT outsourcing networks weakens the impacts of these technologies investments on external breaches but amplifies the negative relationship between identity and access management security systems and internal breaches. Our results offer an alternative understanding of organizational IT security investments and explain contrary results found in prior studies. Practical guidelines on organizational IT security strategies are discussed.
Keywords: IT security investments; security breaches; digitalization; network embeddedness; routine activity theory; healthcare informatics

Handling the Efficiency–Personalization Trade-Off in Service Robotics: A Machine-Learning Approach - Tofangchi, Schahin; Hanelt, André; Marz, David; Kolbe, Lutz M (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
While multiple mechanisms for value creation from big data analytics (BDA) exist, their application in everyday life can create trade-offs, particularly in the context of service robotics where the dispersion of autonomous digital technologies creates potentials for data-driven efficiency gains. Attending to personal preferences in such contexts, increasingly vital for customer acceptance, may run counter to efficiency, thus constraining value creation and rendering efficiency-personalization trade-offs a key managerial challenge. For the case of autonomous vehicles (AVs), we formalize this trade-off and design a machine-learning approach to handle it by drawing on a unique dataset comprising 35,000 drives by 1,850 users. We consider the real-time dynamics and user interactions that affect the decisions of AVs and develop a model extension that allows for leveraging the properties of sharing business models to make better-informed decisions. Our study contributes to information systems (IS) AV research by providing an artifact that targets both efficiency and personalization of AV operations as well as the dynamic balance between the two. With the focus on everyday life contexts, our study points to the value of incorporating trade-offs between competing goals as well as human-centered perspectives in information systems designs for research on BDA value creation. For practitioners, our work provides a practical and generalizable approach to realize the potentials of service robots without risking customer acceptance.
Keywords: Autonomous vehicles; machine learning; service robots; real-time computation; sharing economy; trade-off learning

Chain of Values: Examining the Economic Impacts of Blockchain on the Value-Added Tax System - Cho, Soohyun; Lee, Kyungha (Kari); Cheong, Arion; No, Won Gyun; Vasarhelyi, Miklos A (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Blockchain technology can benefit inter-organizational activities by improving data integrity, increasing transaction transparency, and decreasing transaction costs. In this paper, we discuss the strategic and economic value of this technology by applying it to the value-added tax (VAT) reporting system, focusing on blockchain’s characteristic traceability. By effectively increasing financial transparency, the application of blockchain to the VAT system can prevent VAT-related fraud (e.g., underreported VAT) that can arise due to the information asymmetry that exists at different stages of the supply chain. We develop a game theoretical model that involves a retailer and two vendors in order to study the players’ strategic decisions regarding blockchain adoption and to examine the effects on social welfare. We also show how the decision to adopt blockchain depends on considerations such as adoption costs, the vendors’ VAT reporting behavior, the retailer’s profit margins, and inter-vendor competition. Furthermore, we find that under certain conditions, policymakers can increase social welfare by providing subsidies to encourage blockchain adoption.88
Keywords: Blockchain; value-added tax; VAT; game theoretical model; strategic financial transparency; social welfare; blockchain impacts

What Drives the Adoption of the Blockchain Technology? A Fit-Viability Perspective - Liang, Ting-Peng; Kohli, Rajiv; Huang, Hang-Chang; Li, Zong-Lin (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Blockchain technology has the promise of transforming security and trust in digital transactions. However, concerns about technical complexity and the benefits of deployment have blunted its adoption. We examine factors that influence managerial intention to adopt blockchain technology. We extend the fit-viability model (FVM) and develop a value-based technology adoption model through an empirical study of 242 managers mostly in medical and financial industries. Managers in such organizations are likely to consider fit and viability in adopting blockchain technology to store and protect data. Drawing upon Fit-Viability and Task-Technology Fit models, and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), we test a model with Partial Least Squares (PLS) to assess managers’ intention to adopt blockchain technology. Our findings indicate that functional and symbolic benefits have positive impact on managers’ assessment of task-technology fit. Furthermore, viability is an important criterion in adopting blockchain technology.
Keywords: Blockchain; task-technology fit; environment-technology fit; fit-viability models; functional/symbolic benefits; blockchain adoption; technology adoption

Use Of Blockchain As A Resource For Combating Corruption In Global Shipping: An Interpretive Case Study - Sarker, Suprateek; Henningsson, Stefan; Jensen, Thomas; Hedman, Jonas (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Corruption is one of the most troubling societal challenges facing businesses today. Businesses have been combating corruption in fragmented ways, sometimes by creating anti-corruption policies applicable to certain stakeholders and, at other times, by harnessing digital technologies. Recently, the power of blockchain, with its capacity to provide full transactional disclosure and thereby reduce uncertainty, insecurity, and ambiguity in transactions, has been touted as being a game changer in the fight against corruption. Based on a study of the global shipping industry, we find that blockchain mitigates both process and document-related corruption. Based on these findings, we develop an understanding of how corruption may be combated using both social and digital/informational resources, including blockchain technology. Our model, drawing on past work on corruption, shows the complex interplay between identity, institutional actors, technical and other resources, and practices, and we develop conditions that could be effective in fighting corruption by using technologies such as blockchain.
Keywords: Blockchain; corruption; fraud prevention; global shipping; anti-corruption methods; interpretive case study

Beyond the Block: A Novel Blockchain-Based Technical Model for Long-Term Care Insurance - Zhang, Wenping; Wei, Chih-Ping; Jiang, Qiqi; Peng, Chih-Hung; Zhao, J Leon (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
The insurance business is characterized by complicated transactional interrelationships among various stakeholders involved in insurance-related activities. Given this unique nature, the century-old challenge in the insurance industry is to effectively reduce transaction costs among the stakeholders while maintaining business privacy and trust. Although blockchain is a promising technology to mitigate this challenge, two technical issues, namely (1) inefficiency in data auditing and (2) difficulty in verifying encrypted data, are of strategic importance when applying blockchain to the insurance industry. To address these technical challenges, we propose an innovative blockchain-based technical model, InsurModel, in the context of newly initiated long-term care insurance in China. Specifically, we utilize cryptographical methods including “zero-knowledge-proof” to 1) represent business interdependence and 2) verify confidential business information without disclosure of specifics. We demonstrate the scalability and applicability of InsurModel and explore its strategic implications in constraining adverse behaviors of the stakeholders.
Keywords: Long-term care insurance; blockchain application; business interdependence; zero-knowledge proof; transaction-cost economics; blockchain in insurance

The Making of Data Commodities: Data Analytics as an Embedded Process - Aaltonen, Aleksi; Alaimo, Cristina; Kallinikos, Jannis (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
This paper studies the process by which data are generated, managed, and assembled into tradable objects we call data commodities. We link the making of such objects to the open and editable nature of digital data and to the emerging big data industry in which they are diffused items of exchange, repurposing, and aggregation. We empirically investigate the making of data commodities in the context of an innovative telecommunications operator, analyzing its efforts to produce advertising audiences by repurposing data from the network infrastructure. The analysis unpacks the processes by which data are repurposed and aggregated into novel data-based objects that acquire organizational and industry relevance through carefully maintained metrics and practices of data management and interpretation. Building from our findings, we develop a process theory that explains the transformations data undergo on their way to becoming commodities and shows how these transformations are related to organizational practices and to the editable, portable, and recontextualizable attributes of data. The theory complements the standard picture of data encountered in data science and analytics, and renews and extends the promise of a constructivist Information Systems (IS) research into the age of datafication. The results provide practitioners, regulators included, vital insights concerning data management practices that produce commodities from data.
Keywords: Advertising audience; data analytics; big data; case study; data commodities; data-based objects; social practices

Recommendations and Cross-selling: Pricing Strategies when Personalizing Firms Cross-sell - Ghoshal, Abhijeet; Mookerjee, Vijay S; Sarkar, Sumit (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Recommender systems enable firms to target customers with products and services that better match their needs, as well as cross-sell products and services. Considering these factors in markets with monopoly and duopoly, we investigate (i) How do pricing strategies differ when firms cross-sell versus when they do not cross-sell, and (ii) How do these pricing strategies change when a firm improves its recommender system? We find that cross-selling can enable a monopolist to subsidize its price for the focal products, while maximizing its profit. In a duopoly, the price set by the firm with the inferior system (low-type firm) is always lower when the firms cross-sell than when the firms do not cross-sell; however, that does not necessarily hold for the high-type firm. When the high-type firm improves its recommender system, the low-type firm may decrease its price when firms cross-sell, which does not happen when firms do not cross-sell.
Keywords: Recommender systems; personalization; duopoly; online pricing; online cross-selling; game theory; online targeting

Monetization Of Digital Content: Drivers Of Revenue On Q&A Platforms - Ye, Hua (Jonathan); Yang, Xueping; Wang, Xinwei; Stratopoulos, Theophanis C (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Valuation of digital content has important individual, organizational, and microeconomic implications. Yet, the existing understanding of digital content consumption is focused primarily on consumption of free content. This means, that digital content is not a source of revenue for contributors and not directly tied to the revenue or expenses of these platforms and that it is practically impossible to capture its value in national income accounts. Academic and anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that sharing of revenue from paid viewership in paid question-and-answer (Q&A) platforms is a factor that differentiates successful platforms, such as Weibo Q&A, from unsuccessful ones, such as Google Answers. Yet, the growing paid Q&A literature does not shed much light on our understanding of the drivers of revenues from paid viewership. Our study focuses on the unique revenue sharing of paid viewership among stakeholders because this feature makes paid Q&A a success and helps ensure the sustainability of the hosting social media platform. This study draws upon signaling theory to identify the drivers of the sales of paid viewership. We further draw on the cognitive view of signal attention and interpretation and the literature on social media trend and the literature on information perishability to hypothesize the differential moderating impacts of question price and content perishability. Consistent with the literature, we found the positive impacts of social media status and social endorsement on the sales of paid viewership. Extending past literature, we found an inverted-U impact of social feedback and the differential moderating effects of question price and content perishability on the sales of paid viewership.
Keywords: Content monetization; paid Q&A; sales of paid viewership; content perishability

Effectiveness of Integrated Offline-and-Online Promotions in Omnichannel Targeting: A Randomized Field Experiment - Lee, Seung Yoon; Son, Yoonseock; Oh, Wonseok (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Leveraging omnichannel has become a new norm of strategic marketing in the retail industry, with many vendors foregrounding the value of customers who wish to maximize their shopping experiences across all channels. Notwithstanding such heightened attention, little is known about the effectiveness of omnichannel targeting and promotional strategies. Whereas previous studies assessed the economic worth of channel promotions independently of each other, our study delved into the effects of integrated omnichannel campaigns. Using a randomized field experiment design, we provide empirical evidence of an offline direct experience effect and revealed short-term channel substitution (spillover) effects among customers who only use the online-channel (offline-channel). We further examined omnichannel conversion behaviors after exposure to online promotion and developed different coupon schemes based on responses to the previously offered offline initiative. Finally, we detected significant patterns of post-treatment omnichannel migration and confirmed the effectiveness of integrated omnichannel promotions in fostering a shift to omnichannel shopping.
Keywords: Omnichannel marketing; mobile promotion; online-to-offline; offline-to-online; randomized field experiment; channel integration; mobile targeting; omnichannel migration

Designing Effective Mobile Health Apps: Does Combining Behavior Change Techniques Really Create Synergies? - Spohrer, Kai; Fallon, Monica; Hoehle, Hartmut; Heinzl, Armin (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Although several theories could be applied to stimulate mobile health (mHealth) use and change people’s health behaviors, theory-driven mHealth designs are scarce. Instead, developers and researchers often implement behavior change techniques and mix multiple techniques without explicitly considering their underlying theoretical mechanisms. We call this practice into question and propose that combining behavior change techniques doesnot necessarily result in synergistic effects. Drawing on theories of protection motivation and social upward comparison, we engage in explanatory design theorizing to understand interactions of behavior change techniques and their implications for mHealth design. We design, theorize about, and evaluate four mHealth prototypes for stress alleviation. In a five-week field experiment with n = 138 participants and a subsequent qualitative substantiation, we show that there is a negative interaction effect of protection motivation and social upward comparison, rendering their combined application less effective. Our findings elicit mutual boundary conditions for theories of protection motivation and social upward comparison. If mechanisms of one theory are present, they restrict the effectiveness of mechanisms of the other theory. Thus, mHealth developers need to use caution when combining different behavior change techniques within one mHealth artifact.
Keywords: Mobile health; design science; social comparison; protection motivation; fear appeals; stress management; behavior change theory

Attribution of Responsibility after Failures within Platform Ecosystems - Dunn, Brian; Jensen, Matthew L; Ralston, Ryan (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
As digital platform ecosystems grow in prominence, their interconnectedness and complexity also grow, making operational failure likely. How failures in such systems affect user perceptions of separate ecosystem components, however, is not well understood. This research investigates attribution of responsibility and discontinuance recommendations for ecosystem components after failures of ambiguous origin. Building on attribution theory, platform ecosystems literature, and research on digital borders, we conducted two scenario-based experiments investigating negative consequences of failure for ecosystem components. We also explored contingent effects from design elements (border strength) and contextual factors (disruption severity). Results demonstrated that when failures occur, negative consequences diffuse to all ecosystem components, with apps receiving the strongest discontinuance recommendations. Greater disruption severity increased discontinuance recommendations for the app. Furthermore, border strength between ecosystem components shifted negative consequences for failure toward the platform (e.g., operating system [OS] and device). Perceptions of locus and controllability were the primary mechanisms driving attributions of responsibility for failure. However, contrary to attribution theory, lack of failure stability increased blame for the app instead of reducing it. Despite higher coordination costs, our results indicate the importance of better-integrated ecosystems that experience fewer faults and that app developers bear the greatest burden in delivering this experience. Furthermore, attribution for failure can be shaped by clearly delineated borders. Thus, design decisions affecting border strength should be actively managed by ecosystem participants, and app developers may be incentivized to elevate border strength.
Keywords: Mobile platforms; digital platforms; mobile platform ecosystems; system failure; ambiguous failure; blame attribution; system discontinuance; failure attribution

Special Section: IT-Enabled Social and Economic Transitions - Clemons, Eric K; Kauffman, Robert J; Weber, Thomas A (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2014)
ERIC K. CLEMONS is a professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His education includes an S.B. in physics from MIT, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University. His research for the past thirty years has involved the systematic study of the transformational effects of information on the strategy and practice of business. He was among the first scholars to study online global securities trading, business process outsourcing, channel conflict and e-commerce, and the effect of information on product proliferation and the transformation of consumer behavior in these new market places. More recently, he has been studying blogging and social media, cloud computing and cloud computing standards, and the challenges of applying current antitrust law to online business models. Clemons is the founder and project director for the Wharton School’s Sponsored Research Project on Information: Strategy and Economics within the Program for Global Strategy and Knowledge Intensive Organizations. He has held appointments at Wharton, the Harvard Business School, Cornell University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Peking University Law School. He has published over 100 scholarly articles and regularly comments online in Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Tech Crunch. ROBERT J. KAUFFMAN is a professor of information systems at the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, where he was the Lee Kuan Yew Faculty Fellow for Research Excellence in 2011 and 2012. He also serves as associate dean (research) and deputy director of the Living Analytics Research Centre. He was recently a distinguished visiting fellow at the Center for Digital Strategies of the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. Kauffman’s research focuses on technology and strategy, the economics of IT, technology in financial services and e-business, managerial decision making, and innovations in research methods. His work has appeared in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Telecommunications Policy, IBM Research and Development Journal, Decision Support Systems, Managerial Decisions and Economics, Management Science, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Operations Research Letters. THOMAS A. WEBER holds the Chair of Operations, Economics and Strategy at the Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Earlier, he was a faculty member at Stanford University. Weber is an Ingénieur des Arts et Manufactures (École Centrale Paris) and a Diplom-Ingenieur in electrical engineering (Technical University Aachen). He holds master’s degrees in technology and policy and electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and a Ph.D. from the Wharton School. He has been a visiting faculty member in economics at Cambridge University and in mathematics at Moscow State University. He has also served as a senior consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. His current research interests include the economics of information and uncertainty, the design of contracts, and strategy. Weber’s articles have appeared in American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Information Systems Research, Decision Support Systems, Economics Letters, Economic Theory, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Journal of Regulatory Economics, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Operations Research, Theory and Decision, and other journals. He is the author of Optimal Control Theory with Applications in Economics (MIT Press, 2011). The economic and strategic issues surrounding information technology have become relevant to society at large. They tend to have a wider reach, often touching the very fabric of society. What used to be appropriately delimited as “e-commerce” or “e-business” is now merely “commerce” or “business.” Information technology is breaking out of its traditional confines, as its pervasive impact is being felt at a societal level. The articles included in this Special Section reflect this broadened perspective, both empirically and theoretically, by addressing the diffusion of information technology in healthcare, a legacy domain at the core of society, and by examining the inner workings of an emerging sharing economy, which is set to supersede the traditional ownership economy. The first paper, “Healthcare IT Adoption: An Analysis of Knowledge Transfer in Socioeconomic Networks,” by Gang Peng, Debabrata Dey, and Atanu Lahiri, takes a network perspective to explain the diffusion of healthcare information technology (HIT). The key idea is that hospitals do not influence each other’s technology-adoption decisions merely by social contagion across a network of peers, but that the specifics of the mechanism for knowledge transfer are important. A better understanding of the diffusion process can be obtained by taking into account how effective hospitals are either in communicating ideas (disseminative capacity) or in assimilating them (absorptive capacity). The authors bring the idea of networks to the theory of knowledge transfer and the idea of absorptive and disseminative capacities to the theory of social contagion. As a result, adoption is not a simple numbers game as contagion makes it out to be at first sight, but depends, for example, on the degree of similarity between organizations. More broadly, the idea is that the existence of a technology may be viewed as the product of a nexus of specific relationships and resulting decisions, similar to how a firm has been famously likened to a nexus of contracts [2], which transcends the early idea that an organization and its performance rely primarily on its internal hierarchy [1]. The presence of a technology, in this instance HIT, is as much a product of internal decisions as it is the result of heterogeneous interactions across an enveloping network of organizations, in this case hospitals. Thus for society, the view of the whole (network of agents) matters at least as much as the view of the individual (organization). The second paper, “Intermediation in a Sharing Economy: Insurance, Moral Hazard, and Rent Extraction,” by Thomas A. Weber, provides an explanation of how intermediation has helped to make the sharing of valuable physical assets viable in an economy that used to depend on ownership. The author argues that lack of sharing is likely due to a market failure caused by moral hazard, since this moral hazard produces an extreme sense of risk avoidance in the assets’ owners. Before an individual can be expected to willingly share a valuable asset—such as his home—with a stranger, the liability issues relating to potential damage and excessive degradation need to be resolved. Under the assumption that all participants in the market are risk neutral, the author shows that an intermediary can successfully resolve the moral hazard issue by asking the renter to post an appropriate deposit, and applying a surcharge to the renter/guest in the case of a damage as well as slightly overcompensating the host in such an event. The former internalizes the damage considerations in the renter’s decision problem, and the latter eliminates the hosts’ concerns about small damages that may not be claimed. With optimal insurance terms in place, the intermediary can consider the issue of rent extraction separately. How much surplus ends up in the intermediary’s pocket as opposed to the host’s depends only on how easy, or rather how difficult, it would be to match and transact directly between renters and hosts. The results illustrate how intelligent market design can overcome hurdles and enable gains from trade. The insights, elaborated for the specifics of short-term peer-to-peer sharing of accommodation, are broadly applicable to the collaborative consumption of durables. A key enabling factor for the intermediaries is the availability of information technology, which is therefore instrumental in a general transition to the collaborative use of assets. Party supply rental companies and tool rental companies have existed for some time, and Zipcar and Condo timeshares accomplish similar things for the most expensive durables, but the vast majority of physical assets are individually owned and until recently have not been shareable. The value for society includes a higher utilization and better allocation of resources in the economy. Acknowledgments The guest editors express their gratitude to Kim Huat Goh and Zhiling Guo for their help in putting together this Special Section. References 1.Coase, R.H. The nature of the firm. Economica, 4, 16 (November 1937), 386–405. 2.Jensen, M.C., and Meckling, W.H. Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior. Journal of Financial Economics, 3, 4 (October 1976), 305–360.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1992)
An introduction to several articles published within the March 1992 issue of "Journal of Management Information Systems" is presented. Articles discussed include "Organization Support Systems: Bridging Business and Decision Processes," by Jane Fedorowicz and Benn Konsynski, "A Framework for Linking the Structure of Information Systems with Organizational Requirements for Information Sharing," by Sunro Lee and Richard Leifer, and "A Review of MIS Research and Disciplinary Development," by Maryam Alavi and Patricia Carlson.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1986)
This article presents an introduction by the editor to this issue, which features articles by James R. Marsden and David E. Pingry on information science.

Special Section: Competitive and Strategic Value of Information Technology - Clemons, Eric K (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1990)

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1997)
ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN THE IMPLEMENTATION AND DEPLOYMENT of information systems have begun to receive serious attention from MIS researchers. The three papers opening this issue of the Journal are a testimony to this. Knowingly fielding a system that is deficient in quality is, unfortunately, not uncommon in the information systems (IS) development practice. Asymmetry of information--with the involved information systems professionals, as opposed to the other members of the organization, knowing about the deficiencies--places these professionals in the situation of moral hazard, when combined with the incentives to field the system sooner rather than later. This asymmetry of information prevents the assignment of complete responsibility to the agents and, according to agency theory, will result in the agents' acting in their own interest rather than in the interest of the organization on whose behalf they are expected to act. Yet, an ethical person will not act as a purely utility-maximizing economic agent in a situation of moral hazard. Indeed, such are the results reported in the first paper of this issue by Brad Tuttle, Adrian Harrell, and Paul Harrison, who investigate how experienced IS professionals would make a decision in a hypothetical situation of moral hazard. These results indicate that the increased attention being paid to ethical consciousness raising in the MIS and the broader business community can pay off. The software industry suffers multibillion-dollar losses because of software piracy. Deterrent controls (legal sanctions) and preventive controls (increasing the cost of piracy by technological means) can be used to combat it. Ram D. Gopal and G. Lawrence Sanders offer an economic model of the effect of these two control strategies on software piracy and on the performance of software publishers. Only the deterrent controls emerge as an effective weapon against software piracy. The authors provide an empirical validation of their model in this regard. The authors of the next paper, Hsing K. Cheng, Ronald R. Sims, and Hildy Teegen, approach the software piracy problem from a different angle: They attempt to identify empirically the reasons why people pirate software. The affordability of software emerges as an important answer, and the authors offer pricing suggestions for software publishers. The next two papers in the issue address international computing. Phillip Ein-Dor, Michael D. Myers, and K.S. Raman present an analysis of the information technology industries in three small developed countries: Israel, New Zealand, and Singapore. The countries are similar in their ability to rely on their human resources, rather than on any apparent advantages in natural resources, to achieve their developed-country status. Government policy emerges as the dominant factor in developing the indigenous information technology industries. The advantages of smallness appear to lie in the governments' ability to implement their development policies. The lessons from this work can be drawn--to an extent--on the state and metropolitan levels in larger countries. Richard T. Watson, Gigi G. Kelly, Robert D. Galliers, and James C. Brancheau consolidate and analyze the work on the key issues in information systems management in an international perspective. They identify and define four clusters of countries with somewhat similar key concerns. The authors offer national culture and economic development as the principal explanatory factors for this differentiation. It is clear that much more work has to be done to identify the factors more closely, particularly in view of the explanations offered by the preceding paper. Electronic commerce (E-commerce) continues to capture the interest of both investigators and practitioners. In particular, the Internet-based E-commerce is attracting significant attention. Anitesh Barua, Sury Ravindran, and Andrew B. Whinston propose an analytical model that could help a buyer to maximize payoff from the process of selecting suppliers over the Internet. Considering that the Internet brings to the buyer's attention a great variety of suppliers with widely differing capabilities (``Nobody knows you are a dog on the Internet,'' says the caption to a New Yorker cartoon), search strategies emerge as an important factor in isolating appropriate suppliers. Further work will lead to strategies with broader applicabilities, supported by software search engines. The next paper analyzes a range of the organizational effects of a well-known success in the well-established electronic-commerce model: Singapore's EDI-based hub-and-spoke TradeNet system. Hock-Hai Teo, Bernard C.Y. Tan, and Kwok-Kee Wei analyze the transformation of the business network that has emerged after the implementation of TradeNet. The reported gains from several years' worth of TradeNet exploitation include profound--and measurable--effects in the organizational specialization, informated business processes, and ``thick'' organizational linkages in the business network. Taken together, the effects are perceptible on the national level, as implicitly reported by Ein-Dor and his colleagues in their paper in this issue. We shall all witness with great interest the effects of the Internet on the further fortunes of TradeNet and of the business network that relies on it. An interesting and specific problem is addressed in the paper by William B. Fredenberger, Astrid Lipp, and Hugh J. Watson: What are the information requirements of managers attempting to restore a failing business to health? Based on a survey of these managers, the authors identify the functional areas that need to be reported on and the types of reports the managers need to begin turning the firm around. These managers also tell us that the information they need is usually not available. Might we consider this a symptom of failure? Priorities in shoring up organizational information systems for a turnaround clearly emerge from the paper. The concluding paper of the issue concerns the effects of the use of a group decision support systems (GDSS). In a laboratory experiment involving practicing managers, Simon S.K. Lam shows that the effects of the GDSS use on the quality of the decision and on the pattern of group communication depend on the nature of the task, classified into one of three categories. This is yet another contribution to our understanding of the complex effects of group-support tools. I think you will find the diverse subjects presented and methodologies deployed stimulating and, in many cases, you will judge the paper a good read. I would like to thank our outgoing member of the Editorial Board Jack Baroudi for his contribution and welcome to the Board new members Izak Benbasat and Magid Igbaria. VLADIMIR ZWASS Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2008)
Along with the growth of electronic marketplaces, we are witnessing the growing sophistication of their deployment in corporate sourcing. The first flush of enthusiasm for auction markets has faded, yet the possibility of their use is always in the background, mustering a degree of market discipline. In the opening paper of this JMIS issue, Mu Xia and Nan Xia study the complementarity in the sourcing via long-term supplier relationships on the one hand and the transactional as well as informational use of spot markets on the other. The advantages of sourcing of direct goods through long-term relationships with a limited number of suppliers are well known, yet these relationships cannot go uninfluenced by the opportunities and pressures radiating from the e‑marketplaces. The opportunities include the ability to smooth over supply or demand fluctuations; the pressures will surface during the negotiations of long-term contracts. The present authors, using a game-theoretic approach, ask several research questions regarding the effects of the use of e‑markets in the presence of long-term sourcing relationships. The researchers arrive at a number of results regarding the desirable actions of the suppliers, buyers, and market intermediaries, and interpret these results at length for the benefit of other scholars and of managers. Electronic marketplaces for vertically integrated digital services are the subject of the paper by Ravi Bapna, Paulo Goes, and Alok Gupta. Such marketplaces furnish multiple classes of a service—say, music webcasts or video performances—differentiated by various aspects of quality and by price. As a variant of versioning, this type of marketplace structure aims to capture a wider swath of demand than a single-price market would muster. The authors develop and exercise an auction-based computational infrastructure for resource allocation and pricing in such marketplaces. Considering that the Internet–Web compound is turning into a multifaceted venue for service provision based on the real-time allocation of various information technology (IT) resources, structuring of such marketplaces is very much of the moment. Two subsequent papers address information systems (IS) for the public domain. Thompson S.H. Teo, Shirish C. Srivastava, and Li Jiang study the aspects of success of e‑government, in particular as related to the trust in the e‑government Web sites. By studying the continuing use of a large number of such sites (or its absence), the authors arrive at a nuanced understanding of the premises for success. Their conclusions lead the authors to suggest further extensions to the DeLone–McLean IS success model. In the second paper on the general theme, Juliana Sutanto, Atreyi Kankanhalli, Junyun Tay, K.S. Raman, and Bernard C.Y. Tan study the critical success factors for the implementation of interorganizational IS that are to serve the public. It is well known that a proper process of change management is a criterion of success. The authors’ case-based research refines and contextualizes this dictum into a parsimonious set of factors to live by and an embryonic theory of the phenomena. The subject of change management is taken up by Sebastián Bruque, José Moyano, and Jacob Eisenberg. The researchers study the role of social networks—which they dichotomize as supportive and informational—in the adaptation of organizational actors to new IT. The authors expressly use the adaptation, rather than the adoption, lens to attain a deeper level of understanding of individual psychological dispositions under what some have termed technostress of various degrees. The results surface the importance of group processes in a firm, and bear managerial implications for the nurturing of the desirable social networks and processes. Open source software (OSS) is a disruptive technological phenomenon across marketplaces, as well as the subject of the next two papers in the issue. There exists a very broad spectrum of OSS licenses in terms of the restrictions they place on the use, modification, and distribution of software. The licensing of the derivative software is a particularly potent discriminator among the original licenses. How to choose? Here, Ravi Sen, Chandrasekar Subramaniam, and Matthew L. Nelson study this issue from the point of view of the OSS developers through theoretically grounded empirics. Although this may seem paradoxical to those in possession of an idealistic lens on the OSS, this research surfaces the dominant value of restrictive OSS licenses. In a very different, both thematically and methodologically, work, Jeevan Jaisingh, Eric W.K. See‑To, and Kar Yan Tam deploy formal economic analysis to analyze the responses of a firm developing proprietary software as it faces OSS competition. In particular, the contingent levels of investment and the consequent quality of the proprietary product are investigated. By studying this work, we can see the interaction of the factors as the market disruption is taking place. Peng Xu and Balasubramaniam Ramesh investigate the role knowledge management can play in the structuring of the IS development. The general premise is that the software (development) process should be tailored to better suit the given project. The authors explore the link between the support of developers with knowledge management systems containing knowledge regarding such software process structuring and the developer performance in such structuring. Organizational memory information systems (OMIS), containing contextualized experiential knowledge of the organization in IS project management, are an apt tool for this task. The work is grounded in the theory of cognitive fit. The authors arrive at rather finely textured recommendations regarding the type of beneficial knowledge support and the nature of the tailoring tasks supported to the best effect. As the essential tool of business analytics, data mining finds ever wider application. A broad class of predictive data mining, the regression problems that predict a continuous dependent variable, addresses areas of application such as credit evaluation or demand forecasting. Regression models have to be tuned to minimize their prediction errors. Yet how should such errors be quantified? In their paper, Gaurav Bansal, Atish P. Sinha, and Huimin Zhao argue that this should be done in terms of the average misprediction cost. The authors proceed to present an algorithm for tuning a regression model to minimize such cost and show its superior performance under a variety of cost functions. In the concluding paper of the issue, Hemantha S.B. Herath and Tejaswini C. Herath deploy the real options theory to the investments in IS security. The authors analyze the specificity of applying real options in this domain. They further present a relatively generalized model of such investments, with learning features implemented through the revision of configuration parameters. The nature of the solution foregrounds the postaudit of security investments. The model is of value in this active research domain as these and other authors strive to develop models that are general, adaptive, and capable of practical application. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Special Section: The Economics of Sharing and Information Security - Kauffman, Robert J; Weber, Thomas A (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
As the moving parts of a given economy, all individual agents are sitting in the same boat. Their needs and wants, as they may arise and disappear over time, are connected by common resources, infrastructure, and information. The strength of the interconnections can be modulated by third parties, the latter being thought of as less flexible and more reliable pieces of the economy, including intermediaries, market makers, and information aggregators. This Special Section, on the Economics of Sharing and Information Security, features three papers about the economic incentives to “engage” as a consequence of strategic actions taken by these third parties. In this context, the word “engage” stands for the agents’ participation—as suppliers or buyers—in an economy where material and immaterial goods, including durable products, time, and security, are shared with others. Until about a decade ago, whenever purchasing a power drill or a car, an agent would have had to decide about whether her somewhat random future needs, for drilling holes or driving a car, would be worth investing in the ownership of the corresponding durable good. She needs to consider all possible alternatives, such as hiring a service to drill holes or a taxi to get around, whenever such need arises. Since then, what has changed? The answer is, unsurprisingly: a lot! With the advent of sharing markets, agents now have a third option, namely renting a durable good from a peer, which amounts to a decreased commitment in ownership, and more generally, more flexibility to consume. This flexibility is associated with a stronger link between needs (as they come up) and the spending that goes with satisfying them. This results in better use of resources, including not only the agents’ cash but also the utilization of the goods themselves, with the drill’s lifetime usage increasing dramatically, and the car’s need for idle storage dropping. The idea of engagement with others through sharing clearly goes beyond the mere exchange of goods. It includes the exchange and use of one’s own time as well. A more flexible use of a driver’s time in a market with strong interconnections to the needs of others increases her willingness to engage. We must understand that the intrinsic value of sharing markets comes from the added flexibility in both use (for non-owners) and provision (for owners), and that stronger interconnections between the two sides of the markets (i.e., owners and non-owners) create more flexibility. Then we must also ask  how the third parties can take actions so as to encourage the two sides to engage with each other. For example, how would a ridesharing intermediary encourage the owners of vehicles to offer their services to their non-car-owning peers? Or, what mechanisms can be employed by a manufacturer, so as to better respond to the existence of a market for sharing the durable goods he sells? This may mean smarter devices, to better enable the flows of information related to the collaborative consumption and longer product lifetimes, to balance the streams of revenue from retail and sharing, and to support a more flexible way of charging for products and their collaborative consumption. The preceding questions go to the core, or rather the long-term viability, of a “sharing economy” with strong connections among individuals. Participation must be high, or else the connections weaken endogenously, and the economy drifts back into a more discrete “ownership economy,” with all the resource inefficiencies this may entail. They concern the “second-order” effects, beyond the more mundane “first-order” questions of who is sharing what with whom, and at what price, which have already been discussed elsewhere. But rather, they inquire about how should products be designed and marketed, so as to be attractive in an economy with strong interconnections. And, similarly, how should relationships with suppliers, such as drivers, be designed so as to encourage high participation and therefore the sustained existence of the sharing economy as a whole? Information security is in fact no different! Agents (including firms) are increasingly interconnected, and therefore also vulnerable to direct and indirect attacks from outside. An indirect attack may start with a direct attack on agent A, using this agent’s connections with agent B to eventually penetrate the latter’s security defenses indirectly, via shared infrastructure. Thus, a portion of each agent’s security investment is shared with other agents, who—as far as these shared portions go—get to free-ride on the others’ goodwill. This gives rise to a “tragedy of the commons,” that is, a security underinvestment relative to what would appear optimal for a benevolent social planner’s authoritative choice. Hence, how can a third party increase the perceived strength of the connections between the different agents, when doing so tends in fact to increase incentives for investing in the common good? One possible answer, as it turns out, may be to simply provide better information about each other, creating transparency about poor performance and thus improve incentives to catch up, and from there a ratcheting effect toward more security investment. The papers included here present three distinct attempts to answer these questions, from different angles and using different methodologies, but with unifying insights on the importance of interconnections and the resulting payoff externalities. The special section opens with “Drivers of Supplier Participation in Ride-Hailing Platforms” by Soo Jeong Hong, Johannes M. Bauer, Kwangjin Lee, and Nelson F. Granados. The authors conducted a randomized quasi-experimental and exploratory empirical study related to Uber’s driver contracts and the ridesharing platform’s flexibility and financial-security incentives to encourage their participation. This paper is among the first to study both active and inactive drivers, as well as the opportunities they have to either single-home with Uber or multi-home with Uber and other ridesharing platforms. The theoretical perspective that they leverage focuses on the decision logic of drivers’ utility maximization, blended with their willingness-to-work when the platform guarantees them a minimum wage, a company-sponsored benefits plan, and personal privacy while enabling them to screen passengers who may be inappropriate or risky to provide their services to. The authors report that drivers were willing to contractually commit to a minimum number of hours of service provision while sacrificing some scheduling flexibility, and that drivers put a lot of emphasis on the working conditions they face as ridesharing suppliers in their primary job when deciding about whether to participate. Conversely, the choice between single-homing and multi-homing is also shown to be associated with the drivers’ preferences for providing the services demanded by Uber. The second article is on “How to Market Smart Products: Design and Pricing for Sharing Markets,” authored by Thomas A. Weber, a guest editor of this Special Section, whose recent research output has included new theoretical foundations for a range of questions related to the sharing economy. They cover: sharing economy product pricing and consumer choice of buying goods versus accessing them on a sharing market—paired with firms’ incentives to provide product durability; and the value of insurance contracts for sharing intermediaries to decouple their rent-extraction problem from the underlying inter-agent moral-hazard problem. His present article considers product ecosystems that enable user-sensing, and make it possible for sharing intermediaries to control aftermarket consumption patterns. The author notes that suppliers can take value-maximizing decisions about how to design durable products for sharing, including a flexible pricing schedule—charging separately for the purchase and subsequent sharing authorizations. His optimization model, which includes the use of optimal control, implies that good product designs balance the trade-off between the respective demands for product reusability and aftermarket transferability. This research also offers a 2-by-2 “shareability- control matrix” as a simple navigation aid for a supplier’s actions, by-quadrant, where rent extraction is either ownership-based or usage-based, and consumption is based either on exclusive ownership or on shared access. This matrix may help a senior manager to better assess the trade-offs between shareability and aftermarket control, and should provide a valuable decision tool for industry managers to determine the best balance, by product design, between revenues from retail and from sharing. The third and final contribution is entitled “Understanding Security Vulnerability Awareness, Firm Incentives, and ICT Development in Pan-Asia,” by Yunhui Zhuang, Yunsik Choi, Shu He, Alvin C.M. Leung, Gene M. Lee, and Andrew B. Whinston. The authors evaluated the impacts of a privately and/or publicly-communicated security-vulnerability index on a firm’s incentives to implement tightened information-security measures, in light of the market’s experience with spam email and phishing website attacks. Their randomized field experiment was conducted with 1,262 firms in six countries in Asia, half of which received random treatments involving email with their security vulnerability index and relative security ranking. They report that the treated firms did exhibit increased information security over time, with a significant reduction in outgoing spam volume involving their firms, but not phishing website hosting. They further indicate that countries with a relatively high level of ICT development were more responsive to third-party information, likely due to their enhanced capabilities to address the problems with their more advanced IT resources and routines to address security vulnerabilities. As noted at the outset, all three papers illustrate the modulation of interconnections in a “New Economy” by third parties, where agents conduct new types of flexible transactions, the collaborative use of personal assets, the flexible pricing of retail purchases in conjunction with aftermarket sharing transactions, and the investment in interdependent security systems. Just as in electromagnetism the laws of interaction in the “near field” are quite different from what happens in the “far field,” it is natural to expect a different economic intuition for regimes with “close interaction” and interlinked consumption patterns, than for standard regimes with isolated consumption patterns for the different agents. As a small indicator of such different laws, consider again the second contribution, which contains a nonlinear pricing schedule in the context of sharing. The standard results in such situations predict that “high types” (the most valuable consumers for the company) obtain the largest information rent. This continues to hold as far as the information rent in the retail price is concerned: consumers that are most likely to need a product from period to period should pay the lowest retail price. However, those consumer types are precisely the ones that are least likely to offer their items on the sharing market, so that they in fact obtain the lowest information rent in the “sharing tariff,” that is, the fee the firm extracts from a sharing transaction will be maximal for those “retail-valuable” consumers, as they are not very “sharing-valuable.” Zooming away from the specifics of the problems and solutions discussed here, we note that although the economics of “information systems” (IS) has been a part of the discipline for five decades, the economic problems that continue to arise in New Economy settings offer fertile ground for theory-based modeling and methods-expanding empirical exploration. This Special Section of the Journal of Management Information Systems continues to expand the spectrum of IS topics, supported by recent advances in data analytics, randomized field experiments, and the use of variational methods, to further both scientists’ and senior managers’ understanding of newly emerging business practices. About the Authors Robert J. Kauffman (rk.digi@cbs.dk; corresponding author) holds the Endowed Chair in Digitalization at the Copenhagen Business School and is Emeritus Professor at Singapore Management University. He previously served as Professor and Director of the MIS Research Center at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, where he chaired the Information and Decision Sciences Department. Dr. Kauffman’s graduate degrees are from Cornell and Carnegie Mellon. His research focuses on technology and strategy, the economics of IT, financial services and technology, managerial decision-making, sustainability economics, and e-commerce. His work has appeared in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Review of Economics and Statistics, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and many other journals. He has won multiple Best Research Paper Awards in the Organizational Systems and Technology Track at Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Thomas A. Weber (thomas.weber@epfl.ch) is Professor of Operations, Economics and Strategy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Previously, he was a faculty member at Stanford University. He holds Master’s degrees in Technology and Policy and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and a PhD in Applied Economics and Managerial Science from the Wharton School. He was a visiting faculty in Economics at Cambridge University and in Mathematics at Moscow State University. His research interests include the economics of information and uncertainty, the design of contracts, and strategy. Dr. Weber has published over 100 scholarly papers in such journals as American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Economics Letters, Economic Theory, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Journal of Regulatory Economics, Management Science, Mathematical Reviews, Medical Decision Making, Operations Research, and many others. He is the author of Optimal Control Theory with Applications in Economics (MIT Press, 2011).

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1999)
The field of management information systems is inherently diverse and dynamic. As befits an area of inquiry centering on the organizational use of information technologies, the theoretical approaches and the problematic of the field are fed by and overlap with those of several behavioral and technological disciplines. The diversity of foundational theories and problem sets is amplified by the diversity of research methodologies. Moreover, since some of the reference disciplines, such as computer science, are "sciences of the artificial" [2]-that is, sciences of design that creates new realities-these disciplines move ever new areas of investigation within the MIS compass. For example, as the progress in technological capabilities enables knowledge management, we may observe that information retrieval and, beyond that, the issues of ontologies move within the area of our interests. It is a fundamental and abiding commitment of the Journal of Management Information Systems to present leading research in the field in all its diversity. We have published and will publish behavioral work as well as research based on the development and study of technological exemplars of novel systems that aim to support individuals in organizations. We have published and will publish theoretical work as well as rich case studies that bring important insight. We have published and will publish the work of researchers with positivist as well as interpretivist commitments. The dynamics of our own field, the evolution of the reference disciplines, and the development of the technological substratum continually renew the disciplinary matrix of MIS, to use the terms in which Thomas Kuhn reconceptualized his notion of paradigm [1]. Indeed, scholarly journals are the essential vehicles for the integration and elaboration of this matrix of research and scholarship. The statement of the above paragraph is occasioned by the title chosen by the Guest Editors for the Special Section that opens the issue, Robert O. Briggs, Jay F. Nunamaker, Jr., and Ralph H. Sprague, Jr. Let me introduce dialectical tension here by saying that, far from exploring the outlands of our discipline, the papers are right in the corral. Each of them expands the way we can think about a core issue of information systems: security assurance, processes of human communication, document management, or the very basic understanding of the relationship among data, information, and knowledge. The Guest Editors introduce these works more closely. The first paper of the general section, by T. Ravichandran and Arun Rai, offers a badly needed empirically validated set of partly interrelated constructs that make for effective total quality management in information systems development. Although the empirics are perceptual, they generally correlate with the objective quality performance measures. The study indicates that the managerial quality factors have a cumulative effect and should be adopted as a whole. It is an important complement to the technological perspective generally adopted in the work on information systems quality. The paper is also an illustration of how MIS research can complement the work in the reference discipline of computer science. The idea-generation stage of electronic meetings is particularly vulnerable to the effects of information overload. Thus, users of a brainstorming tool of a group support system have to cope with a large number of rapidly generated ideas and with many comments that support them. Mary-Liz Grise and R. Brent Gallupe present a theoretical perspective and a tool for regulating the flow of ideas based on this theory. They proceed to describe an experiment that shows the tradeoffs involved in using the complexity-handling tool. We still have a fragmentary understanding of the relationship between the use of information technologies and organizational structures. Choong C. Lee and Varun Grover examine the relationship between the use of communications-oriented (as opposed to computing-oriented) information technologies and the firm structure in the context of the manufacturing sector. The authors find that these technologies play a direct role in reinforcing the organizational structures dictated by the firm's environment. Although the general causal contingency model of IT-influenced structural organizational variables remains elusive, this contribution shows that the technologies that enable organizational coordination play a more weighty structuring role than the purely information-processing technologies. It is not exactly bad news for the discipline that entry-level MIS professionals are hard to keep. It is, naturally, a serious problem fo1r the organizations. The work of James J. Jiang and Gary Klein tells them what they can do about it. A long-term supportive view of a novice's carrier is the recommendation that follows from the empirical study presented by the authors. VLADIMIR ZWASS Editor-in-Chief REFERENCES 1. Kuhn, T.S. Second thoughts on paradigms. In F. Suppe (ed.), The Structure of Scientific Theories. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974, pp. 459-482. 2. Simon, H.A. The Sciences of the Artificial, 2d ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. Key words and phrases : ,

Special Section: When Machine Meets Society: Social Impacts of Information and Information Economics - Clemons, Eric K; Dewan, Rajiv M; Kauffman, Robert J; Weber, Thomas A (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2016)
ERIC K. CLEMONS (clemons@wharton.upenn.edu; corresponding author)is a professor of operations information and decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His education includes an B.S. in physics from MIT, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University. His research for the past thirty years has involved the systematic study of the transformational effects of information on the strategy and practice of business. More recently, he has been studying privacy and the challenges of applying current antitrust law to online business models. He is the founder and project director for the Wharton School’s Sponsored Research Project on Information: Strategy and Economics within the Program for Global Strategy and Knowledge Intensive Organizations. He has held appointments at Wharton, the Harvard Business School, the Johnson School of Management at Cornell, the Engineering College at Cornell, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Peking University Law School, and the Desautels Centre at the Rotman School of the University of Toronto. He has published over 100 scholarly articles and regularly publishes online in Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Tech Crunch. RAJIV M. DEWAN (rajiv.dewan@simon.rochester.edu) is the Xerox Professor of Business and a professor of computers and information systems at the Simon Business School of the University of Rochester. His teaching and research interests include business analytics, organizational issues in management of information systems, the information technology industry, and financial information systems. He has won three Best Paper Awards for research, done in collaboration with colleagues at the Simon School, in the use of information systems standards in organizations, redesign of business processes, and management of websites. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Computing, Management Science, Decision Support Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Computers, among other journals. ROBERT J. KAUFFMAN (rkauffman@smu.edu.sg) is a professor of information systems at the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. He also serves as associate dean (Faculty) and deputy director of the Living Analytics Research Centre. He holds an M.S. (systems science) and a Ph.D. (industrial administration) from the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, as well as an M.A. (East Asian Studies) from Cornell University. Recently, he was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Center for Digital Strategies of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. His research focuses on technology and strategy, the economics of IT, technology in financial services and e-business, managerial decision making, and innovations in research methods. His work has appeared in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Telecommunications Policy, Management Science, Review of Economics and Statistics, Operations Research Letters, and elsewhere. THOMAS A. WEBER (thomas.weber@epfl.ch) holds the chair of Operations, Economics and Strategy at the Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Previously, he was a faculty member at Stanford University. Professor Weber is an Ingénieur des Arts et Manufactures (Ecole Centrale Paris) and a Diplom-Ingenieur in Electrical Engineering (Technical University Aachen). He holds a master’s degrees in Technology and Policy and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and a Ph.D. from the Wharton School. He was a visiting faculty member in Economics at Cambridge University and in Mathematics at Moscow State University. His research interests include the economics of information and uncertainty, the design of contracts and strategy. Dr. Weber’s papers have appeared in American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Economics Letters, Economic Theory, Information Systems Research, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Management Science, Operations Research, and other journals. He is the author of Optimal Control Theory with Applications in Economics (MIT Press, 2011). The academic study of information systems has transformed over half a century, as progress in computing itself became more the focus of large firms. In parallel, academic research began to focus more on managing computing and computing professionals, and on understanding the economic, social, and societal impacts of computing. Our special section includes three very different articles, addressing very different problems, using very different research traditions. All three articles address issues in the use of computing and in the impact of computing on individuals and organizations. The first article, by Debabrata Dey and Atanu Lahiri, uses closed-form modeling to analyze a problem in pricing of online goods, and examines the implications for consumer surplus, producer profits, and social welfare. Their article, “Versioning: Go Vertical in a Horizontal Market?” addresses a frequently occurring phenomenon involved in software release. The problem they address is that of an initial software release along with a collection of upgrades available at additional cost, when those upgrades are provided at the time of initial release. Is it exploitive, even rapacious, to get some users hooked on a stripped-down version and then to opportunistically overcharge them once they are committed to the product? Is social welfare enhanced if everything is bundled at once and sold at a single bundled profit-maximizing price? Or is this strategy, with an initial version and optional enhancements, better in some sense, for at least some consumers? Dey and Lahiri demonstrate that the answer is, indeed, complex, and depends on a number of factors, including heterogeneity among consumers in their horizontal preferences, the distribution of these consumers, and their uncertainty about the product’s actual location in its horizontal product attribute space. Their findings demonstrate that under various combinations of conditions about consumers’ uncertainty about the product’s actual location in its product attribute space (PAS), their preferences for their ideal location of a product in its PAS, and the distribution of customers with these preferences in the product attribute space, this vertical versioning is the preferred mechanism for enhancing sales. The authors demonstrate the advantages of this sales strategy in terms of consumer surplus and seller profits. In addition, they are able to characterize the regions in which one or both groups benefit from this sales strategy and the regions in which this strategy is strictly welfare enhancing. Perhaps the most intuitive way of viewing their findings is that all consumers who believe they might want a product are able to sample it at a reduced price; those who love the product, or who demand the highest quality, find that their initial purchases include an embedded option to upgrade. The second article, by Thomas A. Weber, analyzes another phenomenon of increasing economic importance, the rise of the sharing economy. The problem Weber addresses in “Product Pricing in a Peer-to-Peer Economy” dates back, although in a somewhat different context, to film studios’ having to deal with the impact of video rentals on their revenues. Do movie rentals—in essence sharing—tend to increase sales by opening up a market to individuals with enough propensity to use it but not enough to buy it? Or do rentals tend to reduce market size because many users who would have acquired a product for a single use now forgo a purchase in exchange for a single rental? Weber analyzes the problem by allowing for heterogeneous consumer characteristics in terms of their propensity of need and use value, that—together with the consumers’ level of patience (their common discount factor)—determine the strategic consumption behavior, reflected by a tendency to either defer use or else to invest in ownership early in order to capitalize on a peer-to-peer sharing market. The study shows that while sharing markets are generally beneficial to consumers because they add flexibility to their choices, they may or may not be beneficial for firms. A firm’s gain or loss from sharing depends critically on the marginal cost of the product relative to consumers’ valuations. For low-cost products, a monopolist would prefer no sharing, provided consumers are not too patient. For high-cost products, sharing does actually increase the monopolist’s payoff. For example, referring to the situations with relatively cheap products, where firms are worse off with sharing, the author notes: “a peer-to-peer economy increases both consumer surplus and social welfare, thus creating an implicit imperative for a social planner to help promote collaborative consumption.” The final article, by Josephine Wolff, is largely empirical, and draws heavily from anthropological and sociological research traditions. As the title suggests, “Perverse Effects in Defense of Computer Systems: When More Is Less” explores situations in which attempts to increase computer security actually make computer systems less safe. Some situations are the direct result of human response to poorly designed security policies. If institutional security policies require users to make frequent changes to their passwords and require that passwords be complex, without embedded recognizable words or even without embedded pronounceable sequences of letters, users will respond by writing their passwords down in readily accessible locations, paradoxically increasing rather than decreasing vulnerability. If institutional security policies involve broadcast messages to users demanding that they revalidate all their security credentials, this invites targeted spear phishing, in which intruders masquerade as members of the institution’s data center and harvest large numbers of previously secure IDs and passwords. While the article does not always offer solutions, understanding potential security problems makes a meaningful contribution to solving those problems. For example, once data center directors are aware of the vulnerability of spear phishing, there are simple solutions. Before a major effort is undertaken to have users revalidate their credentials, everyone can be notified to respond only to requests that come from a recognized data center URL. Each of the three articles thus contributes to our understanding of an aspect of the social and societal aspects of computing. Dey and Atanu teach us about optimal strategies for versioning and multileveled initial software releases in the presence of heterogeneous consumers, and indicate when indeed this increases social welfare. Weber explores widening the boundary of the sharing economy, by making the providers of the shared products an essential part of consideration. Wolff shows us how users, system administrators, and technology interact in the implementation of computer security policies.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1992)
An introduction to several articles is presented. Articles discussed include "AEI: A Knowledge-Based Approach to Integrated Office Systems," by Chandra Amaravadi, Olivia Sheng, Joey George, and Jay Nunamaker, "Knowledge-Based Support for Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Judgments in Resource Allocation Decisions," by Ritu Agarwal, Mohan R. Tanniru, and Marcos DaCruz, and "Performance Analysis of 'What-If' Databases Using Independently Updated Views," by Richard G. Ramirez, Uday R. Kulkarni, and Kathleen A. Moser.

Special Section: Technological Innovations for Communication and Collaboration in Social Spaces - Clemons, Eric K; Dewan, Rajiv M; Kauffman, Robert J; Weber, Thomas A (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2017)
ERIC K. CLEMONS (clemons@wharton.upenn.edu) is a professor of operations, information and decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University. His research for the past 30 years has involved the systematic study of the transformational effects of information on the strategy and practice of business. More recently, he has begun studying privacy and the challenges of applying current antitrust law to online business models. He is the founder and project director for the Wharton School’s Sponsored Research Project on Information: Strategy and Economics within the Program for Global Strategy and Knowledge Intensive Organizations. He has held appointments at Wharton, Harvard Business School, Johnson School of Management and Engineering College at Cornell, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Peking University Law School, and the Desautels Centre at the Rotman School of the University of Toronto. He has authored over 100 scholarly articles and regularly publishes online in Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Tech Crunch. RAJIV M. DEWAN (rajiv.dewan@rochester.edu) is the Xerox Professor of Business and professor of computers and information systems at the Simon Business School of the University of Rochester. His research interests include business analytics, organizational issues in management of information systems, the information technology industry, and financial information systems. He has won three Best Paper awards for research, done in collaboration with colleagues at the Simon School, in the use of information systems standards in organizations, redesign of business processes, and management of websites. His papers have appeared in the Journal of Computing, Management Science, Decision Support Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Computers, among other journals. ROBERT J. KAUFFMAN (rkauffman@smu.edu.sg; corresponding author) is a professor of information systems and associate dean (faculty) at the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. He holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. He was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Center for Digital Strategies, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Earlier, he was the W.P. Carey Chair in Information Systems at Arizona State, and served as professor and director of the MIS Research Center at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on technology and strategy, the economics of IT, financial services and technology, managerial decision-making, and e-commerce. His work has appeared in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Review of Economics and Statistics, and many other journals. THOMAS A. WEBER (thomas.weber@epfl.ch) holds the chair of Operations, Economics and Strategy at the Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Earlier he was a faculty member at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. from the Wharton School. He was visiting faculty in economics at Cambridge University and in mathematics at Moscow State University. He was previously with the Boston Consulting Group. His research interests include the economics of information and uncertainty, the design of contracts, and strategy. His articles have appeared in American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Management Science, Operations Research, Theory and Decision, and other journals. He is the author of Optimal Control Theory with Applications in Economics (MIT Press, 2011). Research on social communication and collaboration is of high importance today in Information Systems, especially for interdisciplinary inquiry that emphasizes topics related to strategy, information, technology, economics, and society. The articles that are showcased in this special section of the Journal of Management Information Systems address issues that arise in a number of important contemporary contexts, including:The effectiveness of social media-based complaint management in the operational processes of passenger airlines, through their use of Twitter and other social media solutions, to stay in touch with customers who experience problems on an up-to-the-moment basis; Collaborative consumption among consumers, and producers’ strategies to extract post-sales surplus using embedded product intelligence so as to detect, authorize, and then charge for sharing transactions; Customers’ disposition to value information privacy, which plays a role in their requirements to know about vendors’ use of their private information, and the extent to which this inhibits their openness to adopting and using more personalized services; The mitigation of loan default in peer-to-peer (P2P) lending through the use of social media-based disclosures about the participants’past borrowing and repayment performance, as a way to create social deterrence against their future loan default. In addition, the guest editors have contributed a research article that characterizes fundamental issues and future research directions flowing from the changing nature of information available in the digital economy. The special section opens with an article by Priyanga Gunarathne, Huaxia Rui, and Abraham Seidmann, titled “Whose and What Social Media Complaints Have Happier Resolutions? Evidence from Twitter.” This timely research studies the extent to which communication through the social media channel is helpful for improving the management of customer complaints, when firms assign customer service representatives to monitor and respond to issues that are raised by their customers via Twitter. The authors’ basic assertion—and one that seems natural for most observers to make—is that opening up a real-time channel on social media ought to result in higher satisfaction levels for customers who bring their problems to a company’s attention this way. The authors were able to gain access to the social media-based customer complaints at a large U.S. airline. They also created a quasi-experimental research design that combines customer–brand interactions on Twitter, with follow-up survey work on how happy the customers were after their interaction with the airline’s customer service representatives. This empirical research showed that more influential customers in the social network were more likely to be satisfied by the airline’s Twitter-based interventions. The authors also distinguished between process-related and outcome-related issues, and found that customers with the former kind of problems ended up less satisfied, indicating the importance of resolving issues in complex operational activities. They also pointed out that customers with past experience for Twitter channel complaints achieved happier resolutions to their problems, yet greater than 50 percent of all complaints lodged via Twitter resulted in dissatisfied customers. This is not quite what an observer might expect assuming the Twitter channel is intended to support higher corporate responsiveness and customer service immediacy. The second contribution, by Thomas A. Weber, explores “Smart Products for Sharing.” The new practices associated with the digital sharing economy have the potential to make products that are shareable in an aftermarket attain a higher value via a sharing premium, since they will be idle less of the time and generate revenues for owners. Producers and retailers may be able to better align the flow of use with the amounts they can charge the purchasers/owners by using the sensing and communication ability of intelligent products to monitor their availability, detect a transition between different users, and authorize their temporary transfer for use by others against a fee. The author uses a dynamic overlapping-generations model that yields a stationary solution for the firm’s optimal selling price for shareable goods, as well as the tariff associated with authorizing their collaborative use. The results suggest that embedded intelligence and a positive sharing tariff can increase the profit for the manufacturer if the cost of deferring consumption is high. In this situation, the extra revenue from the secondary market provides a positive incentive for the firm to support collaborative consumption of its products. However, in this simple model, if the cost of deferring consumption is low, then a sharing tariff may not increase profit. The next article is “Beyond the Personalization–Privacy Paradox: Privacy Valuation, Transparency Features, and Service Personalization,” by Sabrina Karwatzki, Olga Dytynko, Manuel Trenz, and Daniel Veit. Many observers have pointed to the sharp double-edged blade of service personalization. On the one hand, service personalization leverages a consumer’s private information so they are exposed to products that are of good—and possibly hyperdifferentiated—fit for them, based on their private information and discoverable preferences. And yet personal information is simultaneously what service providers take advantage of to create their own business revenues and profits. The authors focus on the question of how the transparency features and service personalization of a service provider are related to the willingness of consumers and users to share their information. They conducted an experimental field study and survey of users involved in a digital service. The authors also explored the extent to which the subjects’ information boundaries varied, depending on the extent of their disposition to value information privacy. Their information boundary theory interpretation does not account for the lack of impact on consumers’ willingness to share information when the transparency features of the digital service facilitated disclosures about its information sharing policy. Perhaps their most interesting finding is that personalization may do little to incentivize consumers to share their private information, especially for those with higher levels of disposition to value privacy. The authors’ overall reading of the personalization–privacy paradox is that private information sharing is generally distasteful, not only when there is an opportunity to acquire utility-enhancing personalized services. Ruyi Ge, Juan Feng, Bin Gu, and Pengzhu Zhang contributed the penultimate article, “Predicting and Deterring Default with Social Media Information in Peer-to-Peer Lending.” In peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, there is a fundamental information asymmetry that diminishes the efficiency of the market for lenders and borrowers alike. Lenders cannot easily discover key information about borrowers, especially their credit quality and capacity to pay back their loans. As a result, borrowers will either be required to pay higher interest rates associated with their hard-to-estimate riskiness, or be unable to get credit at all. The authors explore the extent to which self-disclosure of social media information has any power for predicting borrower default for P2P loans. This empirical research involves a natural experiment that uses data from a social lending platform in China. The authors suggest that information disclosures act as a means of social deterrence for borrower default, due to the associated reputation effects that may occur. Their results probe the impacts of self-disclosure of borrowers’ information as an event, for which it is possible to construct a before-and-after treatment effect test. They show there is a causal relationship between the disclosure event, and the borrowers’ loan subsequent default rate. This special section closes with an article that examines the path forward for research that is related to strategy, information, technology, economics, and society. Eric K. Clemons, Rajiv M. Dewan, Robert J. Kauffman, and Thomas A. Weber contribute a new and future-oriented research perspective in “Understanding the Information-Based Transformation of Strategy and Society.”

About This Issue - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1985)

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2002)
OVER THE RECENT DECADE, ELECTRONIC COMMERCE has been changing the way business is done. It has not brought along a hallowed “New Economy,” with virtuality miraculously replacing the “old” economy as we had come to know it. E-commerce, understood as the sharing of business information, maintaining business relationships, and conducting business transactions by means of telecommunications networks, has been steadily transforming organizational strategies, structures, management, and operations. The advent of the Internet-based World Wide Web has been the potent stimulus for the transformation. Even in these days of lean information-systems budgets very few firms can afford not to relate their strategy to the incursion of the e-commerce-based intra-organizational and interorganizational processes, the e-commerce-based transformation of the marketplaces—and all need to act accordingly. It is not surprising that our annual Special Section on competitive strategy and information technology is titled “Competitive Strategy, Economics, and the Internet.” The Guest Editors, Robert J. Kauffman and Alina M. Chircu, will introduce to you the five papers of the Special Section. Taken together, they offer a broad view of strategic concerns related to the embedding of e-commerce, and of the research methods in the domain. Two papers that open the general section of the issue address conceptual aspects of database organization. In the first work, Andrew N.K. Chen, Paulo B. Goes, and James R. Marsden present a novel architecture for a flexible database system that would be considerably faster in query processing than the traditional databases. Motivated by the need for massive read-only processing, the proposed architecture divorces the update component of the database proper from the multiple read-only components, designed to respond to different categories of queries. Query mining (an analog of data mining) is proposed as an approach to categorizing the queries to be served by these components. The authors validate their approach by experimenting with a prototype. We can expect further development of this innovative idea. As an organization’s information systems are being developed, conceptual data modeling is conducted during the crucial initial database development. At some point, the local schemas of various user groups are integrated into a global conceptual schema. Will the local schemas better support the verification of the resulting database structures by user groups and the future communication among these groups, or will the global schema be superior in that regard? Jeffrey Parsons uses classification theory to offer an empirical answer to the question. Implications for the use of the schemas during the lifetime of the database follow. In the Web-driven environment, there is a growing interest in the use of group support systems (GSS) for individual learning. As we know full well, the multiple facets of the technology and of its deployment processes significantly condition the effects achieved during the GSS use for a given task. Here, Ron Chi-Wai Kwok, Jian Ma, and Douglas R. Vogel empirically study how the use of a GSS and content facilitation (that is, an instructor’s ongoing guidance) affect knowledge acquisition by individuals in a group. Among several organizationally relevant results, it is interesting to note how collective group knowledge emerges in the process of a GSS-supported individual learning. The turnover of information-technology workers is a continuing concern to the organizations that incur related expenses and lose a component of their collective memory. In many cases, this phenomenon also represents a preventable human cost to the workers themselves. Jason Bennett Thatcher, Lee P. Stepina, and Randall J. Boyle present a turnover model that turns on the organizational commitment of the workers, as related to the job alternatives they perceive outside their firm. Stemming from the model is the guidance for the managers on enhancing the commitment and the positive perceptions of the current workplace. During the recent months, the Journal of Management Information Systems, and the MIS community at large, have coped with the grievous loss of one of our outstanding—and much beloved—members, Magid Igbaria. A scholar of surpassing accomplishment and, considering his age, much promise, Magid has left a void all of us perceive. Lorne Olfman gives us a remembrance of Magid as a scholar. So many of us remember him as an individual who worked with us closely, who was always there for a meaningful discussion in which he had something valuable to say, who offered help to those who needed it—all of it with grace and with a shining mind. Magid’s name is included on the page that lists the Associate Editors of this JMIS issue—because he has worked on it, until the last days of his life. The remembrance of Magid Igbaria opens the issue—and we will always remember him.

Special Section: Strategic and Competitive Information Systems - Clemons, Eric K (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1991)

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2013)
THE SPECIAL ISSUE ON Information Technology (IT) and Organizational Governance shows, with a spectrum of research papers, how IT has changed the realm of the possible in the way the decision rights can be placed, formal and informal control mechanisms can be designed to complement each other, and organizational and interorganizational structures can be architected. The Guest Editors, Amrit Tiwana, Benn Konsynski, and N. Venkatraman, in introducing the Special Issue to you, introduce the IT Governance Cube as a systematizing tool for organizing our thinking about the IT-enabled organizational governance, which includes the governance of IT itself. Using this tool, the Guest Editors introduce the papers of the Special Issue and highlight the lacunae that need to be filled with future research. The importance of the research presented here is highlighted by the fact that with changing what is possible, IT has a way of changing over time what is necessary to successfully cooperate and compete in the emerging ecosystems. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the competitive fitness of organizations depends on their ability to collect, maintain, and deploy the exponentially growing volumes of data about their operations, customers, competitors, and the global environment in which they compete. Data management has therefore become a fundamental organizational capability, underlying many others. The distribution of the decision rights-governance, again-among an organization's business units is a central issue in data management. In the first paper of the general section, Chander K. Velu, Stuart E. Madnick, and Marshall W. Van Alstyne use the real options theory to address this question. Based on their formal analysis, the authors offer a framework of recommendations on centralization versus decentralization of data management based on the degrees of environmental uncertainty and the similarity of business units. The researchers proceed to illustrate the application of their framework in several contexts to an effect that will be found helpful by future theorists as well as practitioners. Free sampling of software, an intangible good with generally high functionality and with a very low marginal cost, is a well-established marketing method. The sampling can be done as freeware (a limited-functionality version for unlimited time) or trialware (the full- functionality product for a limited time). Which tactic should a vendor adopt, particularly in the environment of opinion amplification created by online reviews? Young-Jin Lee and Yong Tan find empirically that the innovation-diffusion model is applicable to the problem. They proceed to find the differentiators in the effectiveness of the two sampling methods, in particular, warning about the cannibalization potential of freeware. With the penetration of NeuroIS methods into our research toolbox, it has become possible to account for emotion along with cognition in supporting decision making with information systems. Emotional states obviously affect the quality of decisions; this is particularly so in the case of rapid-pace, high-stakes decision making necessary for such financial decisions as trading. It is known, for example, that traders with higher emotion-regulation capabilities perform better. This is precisely the environment the authors of the next paper employ to test their ideas and design for incorporating biofeedback into a NeuroIS tool that displays the decision-maker's emotional state indicators and adapts the difficulty of decisions to this state. This work, by Philipp J. Astor, Marc T.P. Adam, Petar Jerc=ic;, Kristina Schaaff, and Christof Weinhardt, is grounded in the tenets of design science and exercises their proposed system as a serious game. Both the method and the tool presented here will be of importance in a further development of this promising field. Two papers in the issue explore advanced facets of the burgeoning e commerce domain of online reviews. Xiao (Sean) Ma, Lara Khansa, Yun Deng, and Sung S. Kim use an enhanced experimental methodology to investigate the effect of the early reviews on the subsequent run of reviews and thus on the reputation of the reviews' object. The authors find significant effects of the demographic and psychographic characteristics of the later reviewers, as well as of the properties of the early reviews, on the biases displayed by the subsequent reviews. Going further in the reviews' effects, Liqiang Huang, Chuan-Hoo Tan, Weiling Ke, and Kwok-Kee Wei show empirically the joint effect of the type of the product under review and of the review content characteristics on the assessment of the review by the consumer. Both papers are grounded in theory and, taken together, contribute to our understanding of how product reputations are formed online and of the consumers' role in value creation along with the producers. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Special Issue: Action Research in Information Systems - Avison, David; Kock, Ned; Malaurent, Julien (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2017)
DAVID AVISON (avison@essec.edu; corresponding author) is Distinguished Professor at ESSEC Business School, Cergy-Pontoise, France. Along with his authorship of research papers, he is the coauthor or coeditor of several textbooks. He was founding coeditor of Information Systems Journal. He is a past president of the Association for Information Systems and a program cochair of the International Conference on Information Systems. He was also chair of the IFIP 8.2 group on the impact of information systems/information technology on organizations, and was awarded the IFIP Silver Core and is Fellow of the AIS. NED KOCK (nedkock@tamiu.edu) is Killam Distinguished Professor and chair of the Division of International Business and Technology Studies in the Sanchez School of Business, Texas A&M International University. He holds a Ph.D. in management. He is the developer of WarpPLS, a widely-used nonlinear variance-based structural equation modeling software. His work has been published in several journals, including Communications of the ACM, MIS Quarterly, and Organization Science. JULIEN MALAURENT (malaurent@essec.edu) is an associate professor at ESSEC Business School. He has published in a number of journals, including European Journal of Information Systems, Information and Management, and Information Systems Journal. He is a senior editor of the Information Systems Journal. In this Special Issue, we showcase the importance of action research (AR) in information systems (IS). Our general requirement for accepting articles consisted of ensuring that each study positively addressed at least one of two questions: (1) does the study provide significant novel contributions and insights to those readers who are presently interested in AR or might do AR in the future inspired by the Special Issue, and (2) does the study illustrate the potential of AR to generate novel and potentially high-impact insights in the field of information systems (IS). The Special Issue as a whole provides readers with exemplars of research giving new insights into IS, which employs AR as the main research approach, as well as offering insights into the action research approach itself. In their study, Corey Baham, Rudy Hirschheim, Andres A. Calderon, and Victoria Kisekka use AR in a large enterprise to explore the use of agile methodology to aid the recovery of complex systems in catastrophic scenarios. By being the first study to look at agile methodology to aid disaster recovery, it offers significant contributions to IS research. The combination of three AR approaches (classic, canonical, and dialogical) to empirically test the agile methodology in a disaster recovery event also provides a unique contribution to AR. Further, the authors discuss the relationship between researchers and practitioners during this process. Aaron Baird, Elizabeth Davidson, and Lars Mathiassen describe a lengthy AR project that supported the assimilation of electronic health records by 10 physicians in small primary health-care practices through a community-of-practice intervention. The study justifies the use of AR for this project and draws on the organizational learning literature to develop a model of reflective technology assimilation in which the community-of-practice facilitates learning by the physicians. The study’s novel contribution is to show how we can enhance social contexts for interactions between professionals to facilitate effective assimilation of systems within and across organizational practices. The article by Rajendra Singh, Vitali Mindel, and Lars Mathiassen describes a project by the researchers in which they worked with a hospital to improve the hospital’s billing and payment processes. Health information systems have proved to be a significant application area for action research. New processes were put in place relating to daily error correction, problem tracking through a trouble ticket-like system, and the reallocation of responsibility for problems. The project design and implementation proved to be a low-cost integrated system appropriate to a rural hospital with limited finances. The interventions are analyzed using relational coordination theory to provide insights into how information technology (IT) can improve communication, coordination, and performance. The study also illustrates how rich data can be gathered through action research. Shirley Ou Yang, Carol Hsu, Suprateek Sarker, and Allen S. Lee describe an AR project taking place at a bank in Taiwan over 17 months mainly based on dialogical research. The study takes the reader through three iterations, with a different theoretical approach each time. The theoretical contributions include showing how knowledge creation facilitates organizational transformation in the context of operational risk, and the conditions under which insights from reflective dialogues between practitioners and researchers can encourage managers to open themselves to new and different ways of thinking and acting. A central lesson from the study is that there is a need to frame “risk management as knowledge management” to develop an effective operational risk management program in a financial institution. The researchers attribute this lesson to the use of dialogical AR. As evidenced by this issue and by the published IS action research more generally, most AR studies are interpretive. But AR can also be positivist, and this might be particularly appropriate for doctoral studies. Following an introduction to the cyclical nature of AR and a discussion on how AR contrasts with other major IS research approaches such as experimental research, survey research, and case research, the final article by Ned Kock, David Avison, and Julien Malaurent highlights the potential methodological obstacles that action researchers using a positivist approach are likely to face, discusses two important advantages of employing AR in positivist IS investigations, and gives guidelines for conducting positivist AR successfully. As stated in the conclusion: “we do not believe that IS AR should always be conducted in a positivist fashion, but we do believe that IS AR can be done in ways that would be seen as acceptable by positivist researchers” [p. 766, italics in the original]. The Special Issue as a whole provides readers with instances of excellent research using AR that informs the IS community. It demonstrates the richness of AR and its potential for unique contributions to IS research, contributions that are not easily achieved using alternative approaches. We hope the presented work excites and motivates readers to delve further into this approach and to contemplate doing AR themselves. As experienced action researchers, we hope we have communicated our enthusiasm for this research approach and inspired readers to do a kind of research where contributions are made to theory while improving IS practice, thereby fulfilling the goal of rigor and relevance in IS research. Acknowledgments We gratefully acknowledge our Board of Editors who also acted as associate editors for the Special Issue: Richard Baskerville, Kristin Braa, Mike Chiassen, Robert Davison, Matt Germonprez, Allen Lee, Maris Martinsons, Lars Mathiassen, Darren Meister, Michael Myers, Peter Axel Nielsen, Suprateek Sarker, and Trevor Wood-Harper, and also our excellent team of reviewers: Jeff Babb, Aaron M. Baird, Alexandra Durcikova, Amany Elbanna, Dirk Hovorka, Carol Hsu, Mala Kaul, Mari Klara-Stein, Rajiv Kohli, Feng-Yang Kuo, Francis Lau, Sune Dueholm Müller, Ojelanki Ngwenyama, Karin Olesen, Jan Pries-Heje, M.N. Ravishankar, Meera Sarma, Leiser Silva, Patrick Stacey, and Doug Vogel.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2006)
As the digitization of the global economy unfolds, information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) deploying IT are becoming ever more essential to the value delivery by organizations and by the webs of cooperating firms. The creation, appropriation, and measurement of the delivered value are far from simple. In fact, they are the principal subject of our academic discipline. In the Special Section on Digital Economy and Information Technology Value, Guest Editors Eric K. Clemons, Rajiv M. Dewan, and Robert J. Kauffman have assembled and led into print after extensive reviews several papers that make a significant contribution to our understanding of the processes through which IT delivers value in the digital economy. Notable here is the complexity of interrelationships among the firms in value creation. Outsourcing, supply-chain effects, complementarities, and licensing-based innovation sharing are all the subject of analysis, to which the Guest Editors provide an extensive introduction. Information overload is an epiphenomenon of the digital economy. In the first paper of the general section, Chih-Ping Wei, Roger H.L. Chiang, and Chia-Chen Wu present an approach to the categorization of electronic documents based on the personal preferences as expressed in the individual’s prior partial clustering. The empirical evaluation of the four proposed techniques shows their superiority to the traditional document-clustering methods. Further continuation of this research stream will be important to cognitive coping with the avalanche of electronic text, which may mirror more than traditional documents. Navigating social networks comes to mind. Two subsequent papers address consumer behavior in e-commerce. The first investigates the consumers’ willingness to pay for online content. More specifically, at issue is extracting monetary gains from the content that may be interesting and enjoyable (and paid for when packaged into a paper-based magazine or newspaper), yet of no specific utilitarian value. The extent of the willingness to pay for such content has been, as we know, limited. Here, Alexandre B. Lopes and Dennis F. Galletta establish empirically that the willingness to pay is directly related to the benefit expected by the consumer from the access to information. The take-away to the practitioner is the need to clearly signal the value of the content to the potential consumers, with several practical suggestions offered by the authors. The trust deficit inherent in e-commerce has led to a broad research stream on trust in our discipline. Kai H. Lim, Choon Ling Sia, Matthew K.O. Lee, and Izak Benbasat study the effectiveness of two online trust-building methods. These authors find that the endorsements by satisfied customers—and, crucially, peers perceived as similar—are effective in enhancing the trust by a first-time visitor to an e-tailer’s site. As in the previous paper, the authors offer practical suggestions to enable e-tailers to benefit from this insight. It is important to the further progress of our discipline that the general models of information systems adoption, diffusion, and success be contextualized. Because contingencies are the way of management, the specialization of the general models is vital to the enactment of their insights. In the concluding paper of the issue, Randy V. Bradley, Jeannie L. Pridmore, and Terry Anthony Byrd examine the nomological network of the DeLone and McLean IS success model within the context of two different corporate cultures, dichotomized as entrepreneurial and formal, while including the impact of the IT plan in the empirical study. The results offer a textured understanding of the role of IT at various levels of decision making in the firms that largely explore or largely exploit. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Special Section: Online Coordination and Interaction - Briggs, Robert O; Nunamaker Jr, Jay F; Sprague Jr, Ralph H (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2008)
Robert O. Briggs is Director of Academic Affairs for the Institute for Collaboration Science and Professor of Marketing and Management at the University of Nebraska. He earned his Ph.D. in Management and Information Systems from the University of Arizona in 1994. He researches the theoretical foundations of collaboration and applies his findings to the design and deployment of new collaboration technologies and work practices. He is a codeveloper of the collaboration engineering discipline, and coinventor of the ThinkLets design pattern language for collaboration processes. He has published more than 100 scholarly works on theoretical, experimental, and technical aspects of collaboration. Jay F. Nunamaker Jr. is Regents and Soldwedel Professor of MIS, Computer Science and Communication, and Director of the Center for the Management of Information at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He received his Ph.D. in systems engineering and operations research from Case Institute of Technology, an M.S. and B.S. in engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, and a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Nunamaker received the LEO Award from the Association of Information Systems at ICIS in Barcelona, Spain, December 2002. This award is given for a lifetime of exceptional achievement in information systems. He was elected as a fellow of the Association of Information Systems in 2000. Dr. Nunamaker has over 40 years of experience in examining, analyzing, designing, testing, evaluating, and developing information systems. He has served as a test engineer at the Shippingport Atomic Power facility, as a member of the ISDOS team at the University of Michigan, and as a member of the faculty at Purdue University, prior to joining the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1974. His research on group support systems addresses behavioral as well as engineering issues and focuses on theory as well as implementation. He has been a licensed professional engineer since 1965. Ralph H. Sprague is a Professor of Information Technology Management in the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawaii. He has over 40 years of experience in teaching, research, and consulting in the use of computers and information technologies in organizations. His specialties are decision support systems, strategic systems planning, the management of information systems, and electronic document management. He has served as chairman or cochairman of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences for the past 30 years. Online work has become a mainstay in the world economy. E-commerce, which reached the $1 trillion mark in 2002, is expected to exceed $10 trillion in 2008. Traditional organizational boundaries are dissolving as entire corporate functions, such as human resources or accounting, may now be replaced with online services hosted by third parties. The burgeoning collaboration technology marketplace offers hundreds of ways for geographically dispersed teams to work together toward their common goals. Thus, information systems (IS) and the global network are now the lifeblood of many organizations. The power and complexity of these systems present organizations with a vast array of new risks and opportunities at all levels as individuals and organizations seek to coordinate their resources and efforts across projects, across organizational lines, and across world markets. This Special Section examines key issues pertaining to online coordination and interaction. These issues range in scope from intersocietal to organizational to individual. Each of the papers in the section addresses important considerations for deploying, managing, and using information technology (IT) for online coordination and collaboration. In their paper, "Risk Management of Contract Portfolios in IT Services: The Profit-at-Risk Approach," Robert J. Kauffman and Ryan Sougstad address a crucial management issue with respect to the IS/IT infrastructure required for large-scale online coordination and interaction. In recent years, such infrastructure has become increasingly sophisticated to provide better security, reliability, and performance to organizations who depend on them for mission-critical operations. The technical skills required for 24/7 operations, backups, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery are not in the core competencies of many organizations. These organizations are therefore turning in large numbers to specialized external hosting services for network and server operations. This provides organizations with higher-caliber infrastructure than they might otherwise be able to field, but it also presents both service users and service providers with new risks, some of which they seek to address through service contracts. This paper proposes a new theory for evaluating the trade-offs between contract profitability and service-level risk. Using simulations driven by the theory, they demonstrate that managers can reduce organizational risk by forgoing profit-maximizing contracts in favor of more conservative service-level agreements, yet still achieve high returns. Their work seeks to integrate IT service management with best practices in financial management. Among the most critical challenges faced by organizations that interact online is the need for work practices that let them conduct business with people whom they have never, and may never, meet. Handshakes, games of golf, late dinners, and other social structures allow potential partners to learn one another’s values and interests. This facilitates win-win bargaining and the building of lasting working relationships. These social structures also provide prospective partners with means to gauge one another’s intentions, competence, and attentiveness to critical details, and so to decide whether trust is warranted. Lacking such social structures, those who interact and coordinate online require alternatives for discovering one another’s interests and choosing whether to trust potential business partners. Two subsequent papers in this Special Section advance improvements for online mechanism that support negotiation and establish trust. Ahmed Abbasi, Hsinchun Chen, and Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., in their paper, "Stylometric Identification in Electronic Markets: Scalability and Robustness," propose a solution for two serious limitations of current online reputation systems, which are key structures for building trust in online relationships. Reputation systems allow customers to score the credibility scoring of online vendors to improve trust in electronic marketplaces; these systems can be subverted by two kinds of anonymity abuse: easy identity changes and reputation manipulation. This study used a new stylometric approach to evaluate thousands of contributions from hundreds of eBay users. Findings suggest that the new approach may, indeed, mitigate these two threats to the validity of reputation systems. The paper "Mining Trading Partners’ Preferences for Efficient Multi-Issue Bargaining in E-Business," by Raymond Y.K. Lau, On Wong, Yuefeng Li, and Louis C.K. Ma, reports the design, development, and evaluation of a nonparametric negotiation knowledge discovery method which is underpinned by the Bayesian learning paradigm to improve heterogeneous negotiations in e-marketplaces. Their findings suggest that the new method can speed up the negotiation processes while maintaining the negotiation effectiveness, which may, in turn, yield better outcomes for all parties than could otherwise be obtained. The move to online coordination and interaction creates challenges for individuals as well as for organizations. In the 1960s, Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon famously prophesied, "In the future, the scarcest resource will be human attention." In the knowledge economy, that future is upon us. One of the most important constraints on an organization’s ability to create value for its stakeholders is its ability to bring the minds of its experts to bear on the complexities of the task at hand. Demands for human attention resources exceed supply. Yuqing Ren, Sara Kiesler, and Susan R. Fussell address issues of cognitive limitations among people working in complex and dynamic environments such as hospitals, airlines, and disaster response teams in their paper, "Multiple Group Coordination in Complex and Dynamic Task Environments: Interruptions, Coping Mechanisms, and Technology Recommendations." Using a hospital operating room as a microcosmic exemplar of such environments, they examine the sources, coping mechanisms, and consequences of coordination breakdowns, and identify three factors whose absence may impede effective responses to unexpected interruptions: (1) trajectory awareness of what is going on beyond a person’s immediate workspace, (2) IS integration, and (3) information pooling and learning at the organizational level. Based on the findings of their in-depth case study, they make technological recommendations to promote trajectory awareness and to automate information gathering and monitoring, so as to facilitate multiple group coordination in complex and dynamic task environments. The section concludes with a study of collaboration technology innovation across three continents, reported in the paper "Factors in the Global Assimilation of Collaborative Information Technologies: An Exploratory Investigation in Five Regions," by Deepinder S. Bajwa, L. Floyd Lewis, Graham Pervan, Vincent S. Lai, Bjørn E. Munkvold, and Gerhard Schwabe. Here, the authors apply diffusion of innovation theory to investigate the global assimilation of the class of technologies that most directly support online coordination and interaction. The paper analyzes patterns of collaborative information technology (CIT) adoption across 538 organizations across four continents in terms of influence, decision making, functional integration, and promotion, taking into account organizational size and the size of IT functions within organizations. The paper discusses the implications of its findings for practice and research on assimilation of IS/IT innovations. Each of the papers in this Special Section grew out of work that was nominated for best-paper awards at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). Each paper addresses an important topic with respect to the deployment, management, or application of global-scale IS. We commend each of them to your reading.

Special Issue: Enhancing Organizations' Intellectual Bandwidth: The Quest for Fast and Effective Value Creation - Nunamaker Jr, Jay F; Briggs, Robert O; De Vreede, Gert-Jan; Sprague Jr, Ralph H (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2000)
ORGANIZATIONS AND GROUPS FORM to create value that cannot be created by individuals [7]. Value means anything that someone might consider useful, important, or desirable. As such, value can only be defined and measured from the point of view of a particular entity: a person, a group, an organization, or a society. Because people have many different kinds of needs, wants, and desires, organizations may create value along many dimensions, including economic, physical, emotional, social, cognitive, and political dimensions. In the pursuit of value creation, people are limited by the capacity of their attention resources. When trying to achieve a goal (create value), one person can assimilate and understand only so much, reason so much, and take only so many actions in a day. Over the years, several avenues have been explored to overcome these limitations. First, systems professionals and researchers have developed technology to support discovery and understanding. As we consider understanding in organizations, the question arises: understanding of what? Many authors, such as Ackoff [1], Bellinger [2], and Davenport and Prusak [4], have framed hierarchies of knowledge or information with data as the lowest level, followed by information, knowledge, and wisdom. In last year's special issue of JMIS, Ilkka Tuomi [9] made the provocative and rather persuasive argument that the familiar hierarchy might, in fact, be upside down, with wisdom as the bottom layer and data as the top layer. Upside down or right side up, the definitions of these layers have always been problematic. What is data? What is information? What is knowledge? Definitions abound, but they do not always satisfy. Data, information, and knowledge are related, but how can one express that relationship? And what is the hierarchy? Can we conceive of the whole hierarchy in terms of one of its intermediate layers? The knowledge hierarchy? The information hierarchy? It may be useful to frame this hierarchy as a hierarchy of understanding. We can then define each layer in terms of what can be understood. • Data-understanding of symbols • Information-understanding of relationships among data • Knowledge-understanding of patterns, processes, and context • Wisdom and judgment-understanding of the principles, causes, and consequences that give rise to intellectual and ethical positions Many of the technologies developed by systems professionals, such as semantic database queries, data mining systems, or knowledge representation systems, reduce the amount of scarce attention required for organizational members to find and understand that which is buried-in vast data stores, and in the minds of their colleagues. Second, with the realization that decision-making and problem solving in organizations can no longer be a task carried out by individuals alone [6, 7] came the focus on collaboration and participative problem solving. Collaboration is the degree to which people in an organization can combine their mental efforts so as to achieve common or congruent goals. People in organizations work together on at least three levels: collective, coordinated, and concerted. In collective work, like sprinters at a track meet, organizational members make uncoordinated individual efforts. Group productivity is simply the sum of their individual outputs. In coordinated work, people make individual efforts, but like members of a relay team, they have critical points where they must carefully coordinate hand-offs of deliverables. With concerted work, like the members of a sailboat racing crew, all members must perform their tasks in con-cert for the team to be productive. Be it collective, coordinated, or concerted collaboration [8], in order to combine the power of many minds, a group must be able to create, sustain, and change effective patterns of interaction. To this end, considerable research and development effort has been spent on collaboration technologies, such as e-mail, team databases, workflow automation, and GSS tools like electronic brain-storming, group outlining, and voting tools, to name but a few. However, the effective application of such technologies does not depend on the technology alone, but on the combination of tool and technique [9]. As a result, the development and evaluation of various facilitation techniques are found high on research agendas around the globe. In order to facilitate value creation, organizations apply methodologies, or repeatable work processes. A methodology is a predefined set of steps and guidelines for attaining a particular goal, either focusing on reasoning (problem solving) or action (solution implementation). While they often appear sequential and orderly, methodologies are seldom executed as if following a cookbook recipe [10]. Their main purpose is to provide overall guidance to organizational groups and support repeatable effective reasoning processes to assure that teams reach their goals consistently and with predictable quality [3]. Taken together, understanding and collaboration are the building blocks of what we call an organization's intellectual bandwidth. The intellectual bandwidth of a team or an organization represents its potential to do meaningful work through the minds of its members. Intellectual bandwidth can be increased either by increasing a team's ability to understand or by increasing the ability of its members to collaborate. However, multiplicative gains may be obtained by increasing both. Figure 1 illustrates a conceptual model of intellectual bandwidth. This model may be used to plot the intellectual bandwidth of an organizational unit. Indeed, it may also be used to plot the potential contribution a particular technology might make to the productivity of an organization. The effectiveness with which an organization can create value is bounded by its intellectual bandwidth, which is its collective potential to acquire information, make sense of it, and take action with respect to a goal. Therefore, in order to create value, groups must have sufficient intellectual band-width. That bandwidth derives from (1) their ability to discover and understand, and (2) their ability to create, sustain, and then change their patterns of collaboration. This special issue presents you with eight papers, each of which addresses various aspects of organizational value creation and intellectual bandwidth. These papers were selected from among the best at the 32nd and 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. The first four papers address issues relating to the hierarchy of understanding. The following two deal with issues of collaboration. The final two papers address topics central to information systems research. One is a case study of a large systems development project, and the other offers a taxonomy of IS development methodologies. The lead paper in this volume, "Leveraging Tacit Organizational Knowledge," by Stenmark, addresses one of the great challenges of organizational understanding: how to capitalize on tacit knowledge. Most approaches in this area focus on making such knowledge explicit, which is an expensive and long process. However, the author shows that organizations and their workers can take advantage of the available tacit knowledge without making it explicit. Stenmark argues that the professional interests of users in a corporate setting are examples of tacit knowledge. He shows that a so-called recommender system that is based on this premise can seek out documents of interests to its users. In addition, a recommender system may support the forming of communities of interest. One of the most critical activities in problem solving methodologies concerns the creation and comparison of alternative solutions. In his paper "An Experiment to Assess the Performance of a Redesign Knowledge System," Nissen evaluates the effectiveness of an automated business process redesign tool as compared to novice business process reengineering consultants. The results of his study are encouraging in that they show how groups of problem solvers could move more efficiently toward effective options for organizational redesign using KOPeR-lite, a knowledge-based process redesign system. Figure 1 omitted. In their paper, "Workflow-Centric Information Distribution Through E-mail," Zhao, Kumar, and Stohr address issues relating to the hierarchy of understanding by exploring effective ways to electronically distribute only appropriate information through the organization. Taking a workflow perspective on information distribution, the authors identify two distribution methods-dynamic mailing lists and automatic profile matching. They show that in workflow environments, intelligent distribution approaches can be used to reduce information overload. In order to effectively collaborate, people have to be able to make sense of what information is exchanged. This is a challenge in situations where people exchange thousands of messages-so-called very-large-scale conversations. In his paper, "Conversation Map: An Interface for Very-Large-Scale Conversations," Sack addresses this problem. He demonstrates the conversation map system, which draws from social and semantic network theory. The system assists in understanding and critically reflecting on histories of very large-scale conversations. This is especially useful for conversation analysis researchers and practitioners who need to gain a rough under-standing of past communication without spending a lot of effort. Much research has shown that people using GSS to brainstorm exchange more information than people using standard means. However, there was some indication that people who receive more information do not necessarily use that information to support their decisions. In their paper, "Stimulating Thinking: Cultivating Better Decisions with Groupware Through Categorization," Hilmer and Dennis demonstrate that when individuals use GSS-like capabilities to categorize the information from a brainstorming activity, they attend to that information more thoroughly. They appear to incorporate it into their reasoning processes, and they make measurably better decisions. Because the authors were investigating questions of individual cognition in a group setting, rather than group productivity, they used a GSS simulator to generate what appeared to be contributions from other group members. This reduced the number of required subjects and increased the experimental control. The results have implications both for individual and group decision-making techniques. In the paper, "Group Support Systems: A Descriptive Evaluation of Case and Field Studies," Fjermestad and Hiltz present a sequel to their landmark Winter 1998-1999 paper in this same journal. In their previous work they summarized the findings of more than 200 GSS experiments. In this follow-on paper, they present an overview of 54 GSS case and field studies that have occurred over the past two decades. Among other things, their review suggests GSS has had a positive effect on team collaboration in the field. This paper will be an invaluable resource for GSS researchers and practitioners who wish to "know what we know, and know what we don't know" about GSS experiences in the field. The paper titled "The Propagation of Technology Management Taxonomies for Evaluating Investments in Information Systems," by Irani and Love presents a case study that addresses two approaches that organizations can use to support IT/IS investment decisions. These approaches address a plethora of tangible and intangible benefits that may ensue from implementing IT/IS. Their work is useful for researchers to focus future inquiries into IT/IS implementation and for practitioners to guide IT/IS implementation projects. Moreover, the paper demonstrates how much can be learned just by building systems, and how useful it is to have case studies of development projects to inform the research. In the final paper in this volume, Iivari, Hirschheim, and Klein focus on information systems development in their paper, "A Dynamic Framework for Classifying Information Systems Development Methodologies and Approaches." They introduce a four-tier framework that can be used to classify various ISD methodologies and approaches, which they illustrate with 11 well-known ISD approaches. Iivari et al.'s work is especially useful, since there is no single development approach that is universally applicable. Their framework will support practitioners in the selection of complimentary approaches and educators in teaching students to critically evaluate various aspects of known ISD approaches. The lessons that can be drawn from the work presented in this volume are many, and apply to researchers and practitioners alike. They address ways to assimilate in-formation more easily and effectively. They show how tools and meeting techniques can enhance collaboration in teams. They address issues in the area of organizational problem-solving and implementation methodologies. In doing so, the authors of these papers showcase a variety of research methods and approaches, ranging from theoretical and developmental to experimental and field study methods. We commend these papers to your attention and hope they will facilitate your own understanding and trigger and fuel collaboration with research colleagues. REFERENCES 1. Ackoff, R.L. Transformational consulting. Management Consulting Times, 28, 6, (July- August 1997), www.imcusa.org/Times/1997/imcTimes97JulAug.html. 2. Bellinger, G. Knowledge management-emerging perspectives. 2000. www.outsights.com/ systems/kmgmt/kmgmt.htm. 3. Briggs, R.O.; Adkins, M.; Mittleman, D.; Kruse, J.; Miller, S.; and Nunamaker, J.F., Jr. A technology transition model derived from field investigation of GSS use aboard the U.S.S. CORONADO. Journal of Management Information Systems, 15, 3 (Winter 1998), 151-195. 4. Davenport, T.H., and Prusak, L. Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What they Know. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998. 5. Dickson, G.W.; Limayem M.; Lee Partridge, J.E.; and DeSanctis, G. Facilitating com-puter supported meetings: a cumulative analysis in a multiple criteria task environment. Group Decision and Negotiation, 5, 1 (1996), 51-72. 6. Drucker, P.F. The New Realities. New York: Harper and Row, 1989. 7. Huber, G.P., and McDaniel, R. The decision making paradigm of organizational design. Management Science, 32, 5 (1986), 572-589. 8. Nunamaker, J.F., Jr.; Briggs, R.O.; and Vreede, G.J. de. From information technology to value creation technology. In G.W. Dickson and G. DeSanctis (eds.), Information Technology and the Future Enterprise: New Models for Managers, New York: Prentice-Hall, 2001, forth-coming. 9. Tuomi, I. Data is more than knowledge. Journal of Management Information Systems, 16, 3 (Winter 1999-2000), 103-118. 10. Vreede, G.J. de. Collaborative support for design: animated electronic meetings. Journal of Management Information Systems, 14, 3 (Winter 1997-98), 141-164.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2003)
WITH THIS ISSUE, JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS is entering the twentieth year of its publication. The past 20 years have witnessed the emergence of the information systems (IS) discipline as one of the established scholarly fields. Centering on the development, use, and impacts of organizational IS, the IS discipline has an important core competence. It has a demonstrated ability not only to use theories developed elsewhere, but to contribute its own theories, methods, and theoretically based artifacts to other fields. The well- developed system of journals and conferences for the dissemination and elaboration of scholarship is firmly in place. Consistently among top-ranked IS journals, JMIS has been privileged to be able to contribute to the growth of our discipline. Recent research shows that JMIS is the most representative of the leading journals in the field, along with Information Systems Research [1]. Indeed, JMIS has always reflected the belief that thematic and methodological diversity within a well-defined IS domain is our strength. The present issue of JMIS illustrates this point. Major information technologies (IT) offer vital competitive opportunities to the organizations that adopt and appropriate them, combining them with other capabilities and resources at their disposal. The emerging major technologies also present vital competitive threats to the organizations that do not succeed in such adoption and appropriation. IS executives are the key actors in positioning their firms with respect to IT innovations. In the first paper of the issue, Neil C. Ramiller and E. Burton Swanson assert that such transformational technologies provide organizing visions for enterprises. These authors study the response of these executives to such emerging, and maturing, organizing visions—be they electronic commerce or customer relationship management. Looking at the major IT-based organizational innovations through the prism of the organizing visions, as these evolve through the ascent to the inevitable decline, Ramiller and Swanson are able to analyze the sense-making processes of IS executives with respect to such innovations, set the agenda for further research, and offer guidelines for executive practice. The theme of strategic deployment of IT is continued by Ken Peffers, Charles E. Gengler, and Tuure Tuunanen. Critical success factors (CSF) methodology has been long established in strategic IS planning to derive the IS initiatives of a firm from its long-term objectives. The authors make the case for extending the CSF methodology into critical success chains that explicitly link the attributes of corporate IS, CSFs, and specific corporate goals. A broadly participative methodology, the use of critical success chains combines the bottom-up processes involving the users of technology with the generally top-down CSF methods. Analytical case studies show how the CSF- based planning is expanded in the process. Retention of valued IS professionals has been a continuing objective of their employers. A novel and theoretically rich perspective on the issue is offered by Robert A. Josefek Jr. and Robert J. Kauffman. Using the human capital theory of economics, these authors analyze the various pressures on the professionals to separate and the consequent probability of separation. Based on this, Josefek and Kauffman propose a method that would allow employers to assess the effects of a projected retention intervention before such an intervention is actually made. The work is important for the IS workforce management and initiates a new stream of research into this management. Disciplined software development and adaptation in organizations is necessary to realize IT-linked initiatives. Based on a field study, Bill C. Hardgrave, Fred D. Davis, and Cynthia K. Riemenschneider show that the system developers’ intentions to follow methodologies are not based on the organizational mandate to do so. Such an intention is rather an outcome of several antecedents, most of which have not been recognized by prior work. Rooted in the technology-acceptance and diffusion-of-innovations models, the present approach leads to a richer understating of how commitments to software-development methodologies are formed. Software piracy is a well-known problem, manifesting itself also in the workplace, with the resulting organizational, as well as individual, responsibility. On an extensive theoretical base, A. Graham Peace, Dennis F. Galletta, and James Y.L. Thong build and validate a piracy model. Echoing the conclusions of the preceding paper, the authors show that the organizational mandates and disincentives are crucial, yet not sufficient. The work has implications both for the companies using software and for the software producers establishing its prices. A comprehensive model of IT-enabled knowledge management is presented by Heeseok Lee and Byounggu Choi. The model presents a socio-technical approach to knowledge management enablers, which integrates the IT perspective with the social perspective of culture (with the relevant components of collaboration, trust, and learning), organizational structure, and skilled people who create and share knowledge. The model includes the processes through which explicit and tacit forms of knowledge are created and transformed, and relates these to organizational performance via organizational creativity. This model will be no doubt elaborated and refined through further research it will stimulate. Workflow systems have become a common tool for coordinating organizational and interorganizational operations. Complex work processes entailed in the delivery of information-intensive products bring complexity to workflow design. Hajo A. Reijers, Selma Limam, and Wil M.P. van der Aalst present a method called product- based workflow design, which serves to derive workflow design from the product specifications under certain design criteria. The work is rooted in formal methods, and a prototype tool is exercised to validate the approach in the field. Surinder Singh Kahai and Randolph B. Cooper employ media richness theory to study the impacts of two aspects of computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems on the quality of the decisions reached with the use of these systems. In a laboratory experiments with three kinds of CMC systems, the authors establish the comparative advantages and drawbacks of richer and leaner media. The work both integrates and extends a large body of prior research on the subject. Group support systems (GSS), which for many purposes may be considered a class of CMC systems, are well-known for offering the advantages of anonymous participation. But do they? Stephen C. Hayne, Carol E. Pollard, and Ronald E. Rice show that the participants in GSS brainstorming sessions are able to perform significantly better attributions of others’ comments than a chance guess would afford. Even though most of the attributions are nevertheless incorrect, the dynamics that might ensue from these attributions (should they, in fact, be made) has interesting implications, which the authors discuss and analyze. As JMIS enters its twentieth year of publication, I would like to express my gratitude to our authors, our readers, the Editorial Board, and the journal program manager at M.E. Sharpe, Debra E. Soled. A very special thanks goes, as always, to our referees—the primary guarantors of quality. Here are the reviewers of the Journal of Management Information Systems: William Acar Dennis A. Adams Niv Ahituv Murugan Anandarajan Hayward P. Andres Dorine Andrews Solomon Antony Yoris Au Sulin Ba Barbro Back Yannis Bakos P.R. Balasubramanian Dirk Baldwin Reza Barkhi Henri Barki Genevieve Bassellier Dinesh Batra Irma Becerra-Fernandez Salvatore Belardo Skip Benamati Michael Benaroch François Bergeron Anol Bhattacherjee Sudip Bhattacherjee Niels Bjørn-Andersen Indranil Bose Carol V. Brown Robert M. Brown Glenn Browne Jeffrey Butterfield Terry A. Byrd Edward G. Cale Jr. Judith Carlisle Sven Carlsson Houston H. Carr William J. Carroll Robert P. Cerveny Sergio de Cesare Namsik Chang Debabroto Chatterjee Patrick Chau Anrew N.K. Chen Hong-Mei Chen Kuan Chen Minder Chen Hsing Kenneth Cheng Robert T.H. Chi Roger Chiang Alina M. Chircu William C. Chismar Jong-min Choe H. Michael Chung Roger Clarke Randolph Cooper Paul Cule Qizhi Dai Ronald Dattero Donald L. Davis Gordon Depledge Sarv Devaraj Ali Dogramaci Peter Duchessi Adrie C.M. Dumay Omar A. El Sawy Hyun B. Eom J. Alberto Espinosa Gerald E. Evans Ming Fan Bijan Fazlollahi Steven Feiner Kirk Fiedler Edmond P. Fitzgerald Jerry Fjermestad Steven W. Floyd Edward Fox Dennis Galletta Edward J. Garrity Judith Gebauer David Gefen Paulo B. Goes Janis L. Gogan Thomas Goh Dale Goodhue Sanjay Gosain Martin D. Goslar Paul Gray Saul Greenberg Robert K. Griffin Michael D. Grigoriades Mary-Liz Grise Bin Gu Alok Gupta Jungpil Hahn Barbara Haley Ingoo Han Il-Horn Hann Bill C. Hardgrave Paul Hart Stephen Hayne Starr Roxanne Hiltz Rudy Hirschheim Richard Hoffman John A. Hoxmeier Paul Hu Qing Hu Wayne Huang Kai Lung Hui Ard Huizing E. Gerald Hurst Zahir Irani Gretchen I. Irwin Tomas Isakowitz Bharat A. Jain James J. Jiang Linda Ellis Johnson Kailash Joshi Nenad Jukic Charles Kacmar Surinder Kahai Timo Kakola Ajit Kambil P.K. Kannan Jahangir Karimi Michael Kattan Timothy Kayworth Mark Keil Robert T. Keim Chris Kemerer Julie E. Kendall William J. Kettinger Omar E.M. Khalil Melody Y. Kiang Rajiv Kishore Gary Klein Stefan Koch Esther Koster Marios Koufaris Kenneth A. Kozar Kenneth L. Kraemer Ramayya Krishnan Uday Kulkarni Akhil Kumar Ram Kumar Mary C. Lacity Simon S.K. Lam Gwynne Larsen Tor J. Larsen Kathy S. Lassila Heeseok Lee Ho Geun Lee Jungwoo Lee Dorothy Leidner Richard Leifer Mary Jane Lenard Hugo Levecq Ting-Peng Liang Nancy Lightner John Lim Kai Lim Yihwa Irene Liou Astrid Lipp Paulo J.G. Lisboa Henry C. Lucas Jr. Mark Lycett Kalle Lyytinen William McCarthy Jane M. Mackay Roy McKelvey D. Harrison McKnight Ephraim R. McLean Poppy L. McLeod Simha R. Magal Mo A. Mahmood David Maier Ji-Ye Mao Salvatore T. March James R. Marsden Thomas E. Marshall Anne P. Massey Charles H. Mawhinney Jerrold H. May Roberto J. Mejias Steven C. Michael Thomas Miller Shaila Miranda Rajesh Mirani Ali R. Montazemi Ramiro Montealegre Jeanette Moody Ajay S. Mookerjee Scott Moore Steven Morris Jolene Morrison Michael D. Myers Kathleen Mykytyn Peter P. Mykytyn Jr. Barin N. Nag Murli Nagasundaram R. Ryan Nelson Boon Siong Neo Fred Niederman Mark Nissen Rosalie Ocker Wonseok Oh Bob O’Keefe Lorne Olfman James Oliver Levent Orman Richard Orwig Carl Pacini Jonathan W. Palmer Raymond R. Panko Michael Parent Diane Parente Jeffrey Parsons Paul A. Pavlou Kenneth Peffers Norman Pendegraft Mark Pendergast Roger A. Pick Leo L. Pipino Steven Poltrock Jean-Charles Pomerol Gerald Post John H. Prager Jayesh Prasad G. Premkumar Sandeep Purao S. Raghunathan Arik Ragowsky T.S. Ragu-Nathan Arun Rai Rex Kelly Rainer Jr. K.S. Raman B. Ramesh Neil C. Ramiller Richard G. Ramirez H.R. Rao R. Ravichandran T. Ravichandran Sury Ravindran Amy W. Ray Louis Raymond Paul Resnick William B. Richmond Frederick Riggins Suzanne Rivard Daniel Robey Michael B. Rogich Young U. Ryu Timo Saarinen Rajiv Sabherwal Sharon Salveter G. Lawrence Sanders Radhika Santhanam Carol Saunders Naveed Saleem George Schell K.D. Schenk Judy Scott Irmtraud S. Seeborg Kishore Sengupta Vikram Sethi Dennis G. Severance Theresa M. Shaft Jim Sheffield Olivia Sheng Morgan M. Shepherd Michael Shields Siew Kien Sia Atish P. Sinha Sumit Sircar H. Jeff Smith Eli M. Snir Charles A. Snyder William E. Spangler Rajendra P. Srivastava Thomas F. Stafford Sandy Staples Eric W. Stein Dick Stenmark Lee Stepina John M. Stevens Veda Storey Girish Subramanian Ramesh Subramanian Robert T. Sumichrast Shankar Sunarajan Arun Sundararajan Tae Kyung Sung Roderick I. Swaab Edward J. Szewczak Paul P. Tallon Kar Yan Tam Bernard C.Y. Tan Mohan R. Tanniru Alfred Taudes Angsana A. Techatassanasoontorn David P. Tegarden Gary F. Templeton James T.C. Teng Hock-Hai Teo Thompson Teo Jason B. Thatcher Matthew Thatcher Ron Thompson James Y.L. Thong John Tillquist Peter Tingling Leon van der Torre Jonathan K. Trower Duane Truex Gregory E. Truman Ilkka Tuomi Jon A. Turner Brad Tuttle Craig K. Tyran N.S. Umanath Rustam Vahidov Vasja Vehovar Boris S. Verkhovsky Michael Wade Steven Walczak Bin Wang Michael S. Wang Shouhong Wang Y. Richard Wang Carol Watson Mary Beth Watson-Manheim Bruce W. Weber Thomas Weber Chih-Ping Wei Charles E. Wells Larry West J. Christopher Westland Seungjin Whang Michael E. Whitman George Widmeyer Fons Wijnhoven Charles Willow Barbara Wixom Kristoff K. Wolyniec Hans Wortmann Evangelos Yfantis Byungjoon Yoo Han Zhang J. Leon Zhao Lina Zhou Ilze Zigurs Moshe Zviran At this time, I wish to acknowledge the contribution of an outgoing longtime member of the Editorial Board, Ahmed Zaki. I would like to welcome to the Board its new members, Niels Bjørn-Andersen of Copenhagen Business School and Bruce W. Weber of London Business School. VLADIMIR ZWASS Editor-in-Chief REFERENCE 1. Vessey, I., Ramesh, V., and Glass, R.L. Research in information systems: An empirical study of diversity in the discipline and its journals. Journal of Management Information Systems, 19, 2 (Fall 2002), 129-174. Key words and phrases

Special Section: Information Technology and IT Organizational Impact - Nunamaker Jr, Jay F; Sprague Jr, Ralph H (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1994)
The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Hsinchun Chen and Jinwoo Kim on the use of artificial intelligence to retrieve information and another by Douglas L. Dean, James D. Lee, Richard E. Orwig, and Douglas R. Vogel on group process modeling.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2002)
ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS, OR ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING (ERP) systems, are the information systems that come closest to belying the early and resonant claim that MIS is a mirage [1]. They are indeed expected to support the enterprise's operations and provide its various levels of management with information in a highly integrated manner. When integrated beyond the confines of the individual enterprise with the systems of its business partners, such extended enterprise systems engender a vision of a network of value-creating processes cutting across organizational boundaries. (They also engender nightmarish visions of panoptical control in those susceptible to such visions.) ERP can form a fundamental platform for the informational infrastructure of an enterprise. However, it is crucial to see that they do not become an infrastructure automatically. Strategic planning, organizational fit, business process transformation, motivated and trained human resources, and last, and perhaps most vital, a proper implementation process, are all necessary preconditions to creating a lasting yet flexible infrastructure. The fact that many companies fail in this creation is the testimony to how difficult it is. There is a definite value, then, in studying the papers included in the Special Section on ERP by its Guest Editors, Arik Ragowsky and Toni M. Somers, who will also introduce these works to you. The papers offer, respectively, an in-depth study of several ERP implementations analyzed as organizational learning processes, a quasi-experimental study of the implementation of Customer Relationship Management that extends ERP forward, and the analysis of the business impacts of ERP. The latter study shows that the firms that invest in ERP tend to exhibit superior financial performance. According to this innovative study, an average ERP implementation is a productive investment. A note of warning: there are no average implementations. There are those that succeed and those that do not, in many ways and over time. Two papers in the general section of the issue deal with the effects of information presentation. Kai H. Lim and Izak Benbasat study experimentally the relationship between multimedia presentation, and the retention and recall of the presented information. Their theory-based investigation shows that multimedia has a significant positive effect on the recall of explanatory, but not of descriptive, information. The results both account for the mixed outcomes of the prior experimental reports and lead to practical conclusions for the employment of multimedia. Roderick I. Swaab and his colleagues study the role of visualization of the possible outcomes on the progress of negotiations with the aid of a negotiation support system. More specifically, the investigators study whether the visualization supports better the formation of shared mental models, common visions of the possible reality, among the negotiators. By improving well-defined aspects of negotiation, computer-supported visualization of information does indeed lead to faster consensus as well as higher satisfaction. All of this places increased responsibility on the modeling adopted during the negotiation. The inclusion of functions in a digital product such as software is to a high degree a matter of competitive positioning with respect to the function bundle expected by the desired buyer segment. Marginal costs of production and distribution are close to nil. As a result of a game-theoretic analysis of what functionality to include in a software package, Kai Lung Hui and Kar Yan Tam are able to offer practical suggestions to both the first-moving software developer and to the market followers. The performance of information-system projects has been studied by a large number of researchers and practitioners. Here, Adel M. Aladwani offers and tests in the field a theory-based integrated model of project performance. To benefit managers, the study surfaces a set of factors that will have a significant impact on the performance of their projects. This synthesis should also encourage researchers both to extend the model with additional constructs and to test it in multiple environments. The World Wide Web is the principal vehicle for electronic commerce-and an arena for a wide range of actions and behaviors. As a marketplace of invisible sellers and buyers, the Web-based marketspace is inherently short on trust. Therefore, seeking the understanding of the trust construct has been recently preoccupying a number of scholars, and seeking trust itself has been the preoccupation of online firms. Here, Anol Bhattacherjee presents and tests a theoretically founded scale to measure the degree of trust an online company engenders. The model is refined into a parsimonious instrument that may be expected to serve both the practitioners and the future researchers. It does not take an experienced ethnographer to establish that much of the Web navigation done in the workplace is not precisely aligned with the corporate objectives. Should the employers wish to limit such activities, they could resort to profiling with the use of artificial neural networks (ANN), as proposed here by Murugan Anandarajan. The ANN-based behavior models proposed and tested by this author permit to classify the employees' Web behavior a priori, and thus to establish organizationally desirable Web use policies. The study is also of interest as an exemplar of a novel use of ANN to address organizational problems. It is traditional at the time we enter a new year of the Journal's publication for me to thank the Editorial Board, authors, readers, and technical editors of JMIS for their contribution. The primary guarantors of the Journal's quality, its reviewers, deserve very special thanks. Here are the referees of the Journal of Management Information Systems: William Acar Dennis A. Adams Niv Ahituv Murugan Anandarajan Hayward P. Andres Dorine Andrews Solomon Antony Yoris Au Sulin Ba Barbro Back Yannis Bakos P.R. Balasubramanian Dirk Baldwin Reza Barkhi Henri Barki Genevieve Bassellier Dinesh Batra Irma Becerra-Fernandez Salvatore Belardo Skip Benamati Michael Benaroch Francois Bergeron Anol Bhattacherjee Sudip Bhattacherjee Bijoy Bordoloi Indranil Bose Carol V. Brown Robert M. Brown Glenn Browne Jeffrey Butterfield Terry A. Byrd Edward G. Cale Jr. Judith Carlisle Sven Carlsson Houston H. Carr William J. Carroll Robert P. Cerveny Sergio de Cesare Namsik Chang Patrick Chau Hong-Mei Chen Hsing Kenneth Cheng Robert T.H. Chi Roger Chiang William C. Chismar Jong-min Choe H. Michael Chung Roger Clarke Randy Cooper Paul Cule Qizhi Dai Ronald Dattero Michael J. Davern Donald L. Davis Gordon Depledge Sarv Devaraj Ali Dogramaci Peter Duchessi Adrie C.M. Dumay Omar A. El Sawy Hyun B. Eom Gerald E. Evans Ming Fan Bijan Fazlollahi Steven Feiner Kirk Fiedler Edmond P. Fitzgerald Jerry Fjermestad Steven W. Floyd Edward Fox Dennis Galletta Edward J. Garrity Erol Gelenbe Mark Ginsburg Janis L. Gogan Dale Goodhue Sanjay Gosain Martin D. Goslar Paul Gray Saul Greenberg Robert K. Griffin Michael D. Grigoriades Mary-Liz Grise Bin Gu Alok Gupta Jungpil Hahn Barbara Haley Bill C. Hardgrave Il-Horn Hann Paul Hart Stephen Hayne Starr Roxanne Hiltz Rudy Hirschheim Richard Hoffman John A. Hoxmeier Paul Hu Qing Hu Wayne Huang Cary T. Hughes Kai Lung Hui Ard Huizing E. Gerald Hurst Zahir Irani Gretchen I. Irwin Tomas Isakowitz Bharat A. Jain Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa Murray E. Jennex Linda Ellis Johnson Kailash Joshi Charles Kacmar Surinder Kahai Timo Kakola Ajit Kambil P.K. Kannan Jahangir Karimi Michael Kattan Timothy Kayworth Mark Keil Robert T. Keim Chris Kemerer Julie E. Kendall William J. Kettinger Omar E.M. Khalil Melody Y. Kiang Rajiv Kishore Gary Klein Stefan Koch Esther Koster Kenneth A. Kozar Kenneth L. Kraemer Ramayya Krishnan Uday Kulkarni Akhil Kumar Ram Kumar Mary C. Lacity Simon S.K. Lam Gwynne Larsen Tor J. Larsen Kathy S. Lassila Heeseok Lee Ho Geun Lee Jungwoo Lee Dorothy Leidner Richard Leifer Mary Jane Lenard Hugo Levecq Ting-Peng Liang Nancy Lightner Kai Lim Yihwa Irene Liou Astrid Lipp Paulo J.G. Lisboa Henry C. Lucas Jr. Mark Lycett Kalle Lyytinen William McCarthy Jane M. Mackay Roy McKelvey D. Harrison McKnight Ephraim R. McLean Poppy L. McLeod Simha R. Magal Mo A. Mahmood David Maier Ji-Ye Mao Salvatore T. March Anne P. Massey Charles H. Mawhinney Jerrold H. May Roberto J. Mejias Steven C. Michael Thomas Miller Shaila Miranda Rajesh Mirani William H. Money Ali R. Montazemi Ramiro Montealegre Jeanette Moody Ajay S. Mookerjee Scott Moore Tanya Morley Jolene Morrison Michael D. Myers Kathleen Mykytyn Peter P. Mykytyn Jr. Barin N. Nag Murli Nagasundaram R. Ryan Nelson Boon Siong Neo Fred Niederman Mark Nissen Rosalie Ocker Lorne Olfman James Oliver Levent Orman Richard Orwig Jonathan W. Palmer Raymond R. Panko Michael Parent Diane Parente Kenneth Peffers Norman Pendegraft Mark Pendergast Roger A. Pick Leo L. Pipino Steven Poltrock Jean-Charles Pomerol Gerald Post John H. Prager Jayesh Prasad G. Premkumar Sandeep Purao S. Raghunathan Arik Ragowsky T.S. Ragu-Nathan Arun Rai Rex Kelly Rainer Jr. K.S. Raman B. Ramesh Richard G. Ramirez H.R. Rao R. Ravichandran T. Ravichandran Sury Ravindran Amy W. Ray Louis Raymond Paul Resnick William B. Richmond Frederick Riggins Daniel Robey Michael B. Rogich Young U. Ryu Timo Saarinen Rajiv Sabherwal Sharon Salveter G. Lawrence Sanders Radhika Santhanam Carol Saunders Naveed Saleem George Schell K.D. Schenk Judy Scott Irmtraud S. Seeborg Kishore Sengupta Vikram Sethi Kenneth C. Sevcik Dennis G. Severance Theresa M. Shaft Steven Sheetz Jim Sheffield Olivia Sheng Morgan M. Shepherd Michael Shields Siew Kien Sia Mark S. Silver Atish P. Sinha Sumit Sircar H. Jeff Smith Eli M. Snir Charles A. Snyder William E. Spangler Rajendra P. Srivastava Thomas F. Stafford Sandy Staples Eric W. Stein Dick Stenmark John M. Stevens Veda Storey Girish Subramanian Ramesh Subramanian Ephraim Sudit Robert T. Sumichrast Shankar Sunarajan Arun Sundararajan Tae Kyung Sung Roderick I. Swaab Edward J. Szewczak Paul P. Tallon Kar Yan Tam Bernard C.Y. Tan Mohan R. Tanniru Alfred Taudes David P. Tegarden James T.C. Teng Hock-Hai Teo Thompson Teo Matthew Thatcher Ron Thompson James Y.L. Thong John Tillquist Peter Tingling Leon van der Torre Jonathan K. Trower Duane Truex Gregory E. Truman Ilkka Tuomi Jon A. Turner Brad Tuttle Craig K. Tyran N.S. Umanath Rustam Vahidov Yaniv Vakrat Vasja Vehovar Alfredo Vellido Boris S. Verkhovsky Michael Wade Steven Walczak Bin Wang Michael S. Wang Shouhong Wang Y. Richard Wang Carol Watson Mary Beth Watson-Manheim Chih-Ping Wei Charles E. Wells Larry West J. Christopher Westland Seungjin Whang Michael E. Whitman George Widmeyer Fons Wijnhoven Barbara Wixom Kristoff K. Wolyniec Hans Wortmann Evangelos Yfantis Han Zhang J. Leon Zhao Lina Zhou Ilze Zigurs Moshe Zviran I wish to acknowledge the respective contributions of the outgoing members of the Editorial Board, George M. Kasper, who served the Journal over a number of years, and Tung X. Bui. I would like to welcome to the Board its new members, Amitava Dutta of George Mason University, Lorin M. Hitt of the University of Pennsylvania, Albert Segars of the University of North Carolina, and Peter Weill of MIT. VLADIMIR ZWASS Editor-in-Chief REFERENCE 1. Dearden, J. MIS is a mirage. Harvard Business Review, 50, 1 (January-February 1972), 90-99.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
The Special Section that opens this issue of JMIS engages two key arenas of the contemporary information systems (IS) within the general compass of economics. One of them is a major opportunity to affect economic exchange; the other is a fundamental threat to organizations and the wellbeing of societies. Robert J. Kauffman and Thomas A. Weber are the Guest Editors of this Special Section on The Economics of Sharing and Information Security. Sharing economy may be defined as a horizontal economic sector where information technology (IT) enables large-scale sharing of resources, be they cars, lodgings, food, jewels, garments, or any other assets that come into the purview of the entrepreneurial activity in the domain. This definition places resource sharing at the nexus of a Venn diagram whose circles include peer-to-peer markets, on-demand economy, crowdsourcing, servitization of goods, communitarian economy, gig economy, and several other analytical lenses and socioeconomic points of view of the analysts. The infrastructure underpinning the ecosystems of this economy today generally materializes as centralized platforms that become the locus of control and revenue. Tenably, blockchain-based decentralized infrastructures, with the attendant (but not epiphenomenal) democratization, will become an implementation in the future. Two of the papers in the Special Section focus, respectively, on the supply-side participation in ride-hailing firms and on the pricing of products that can become shareable and controllable by their seller to various degrees owing to their “smartness.” The third paper of the Special Section addresses the incentives for the firms to invest in cybersecurity. In the Internet-connected world, a firm’s underinvestment in security endangers all of us. An analogy to the carelessness of an individual in a pandemic is apt here. The present study uses an accessible proxy for the firms’ security controls to construct a security index that is then shared with the companies to induce the laggards to beef up their security. From the comparison of the responses of the firms located in one of the six Asian countries to the index, conclusions are drawn by the authors about the relationship between the country’s IT development stage and the firms’ response to this intervention. The results strengthen our understanding that the issue of cybersecurity has to be handled as a common problem. Three papers that open the general section of the issue continue the focus on different aspects of cybersecurity and employ diverse methodologies to arrive at their conclusions and recommendations. Mohammadreza Ebrahimi, Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., and Hsinchun Chen contribute to our ability to identify threats from the dark net marketplaces (DNM), where malware, including the potent (and expensive) zero-day exploits, is trafficked. To seek out the threats, the researchers present a novel approach to semi-supervised deep learning. The approach is semantically embedded within the DNM domain to vastly reduce the necessary volume of labeling. This lends economy, decreases reliance on sparse labeling data, and reduces the human error and the potential bias of labeling. Innovations in the learning network structure are combined here with this original approach to machine learning. Both precision and recall are shown to be superior to the preexisting methods. Generalization and application to other domains are the clear future directions. Fear appeals sent to the IS users are meant to motivate them to engage exclusively in secure behaviors. These appeals are sent to both organizational and personal users. They are theoretically grounded and often effective. Should the appeals be abstract or concrete? The research findings so far have been contradictory. Here, Sebastian W. Schuetz, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Jason Bennett Thatcher, and Daniel A. Pienta contextualize the question and refine the degrees of appeal’s abstractness to provide the answer. They find that the two types of users differ significantly in their response to the fear appeals. At the same time, the concrete fear appeals are conclusively found more effective. The personally relevant concreteness is the key. The next paper in the sequence addressing cybersecurity explores the role of IS governance. Che-Wei Liu, Peng Huang, and Henry C. Lucas, Jr., use the survey method to establish the role of centralization of this governance in the prevention of security breaches. In a uniform comparison field, the researchers use the data from the U.S. universities over a four-year period. The findings show that centralized IS decision-making is associated with fewer security breaches. It has been decided some time ago that the boards of directors and the top executives bear personal responsibility for the organizational cybersecurity. The present findings amplify the correctness of this arrangement and point to a proper distribution of decision rights in an organization. Taken together with the three preceding papers, the work shows multi-pronged avenues leading to cybersecurity and the role our research can play in paving them. Online product recommendations and reviews play a vital role in consumer-oriented e-commerce, strongly influencing the prospective buyer’s decision-making process. The recommendations come from multiple sources. What do consumers do to reconcile the advice when making a decision? This is the research question addressed in the next paper by Jingjun (David) Xu, Izak Benbasat, and Ronald T. Cenfetelli. The researchers use the product-uncertainty model to investigate how the potential convergence of recommendations from multiple sources influences the consumer’s acquisition decision. The online sources are other consumers, experts, and recommenders. The experiments reported and analyzed here show a nuanced interplay among these in influencing the potential buyer’s acceptance of the recommendations. Advice to the online merchants follows. The adoption of an IS is the beginning of a long (it is hoped) road for the users, generally fraught with ambivalence as the positive and negative aspects of the system’s use are felt. This ambivalence is the object of paper by Hamed Qahri-Saremi and Ofir Turel. The authors report an empirical study of the users’ coping responses, ranging from the flexible ones to a spectrum of inflexible coping. The responses may result in the innovative adaptation of the system to the users’ perceived needs (and the users’ adaptation to the system) or lead to the discontinuance of the system use, with a range of intermediate possibilities, such as the users’ vacillation. In their work, the authors relate the users’ coping responses to the aspects of their personality. The approach is innovative and opens a new seam of post-adoption research. Nathan W. Twyman, Steven J. Pentland, and Lee Spitzley address in their design-oriented work an important issue of the deployment of IS in the assessment of job applications. Deception in these documents is not unheard of, while job interviews and hiring decisions base themselves to a large degree on the applications and signals the applications send. The authors offer a design model for signal detection, starting at present with the signaling of the applicant’s truthfulness. The model is theoretically grounded and evaluated empirically. The work opens several avenues for the future researchers. First, the range of signals sent by the application and assessed by the proposed system will be certainly broadened in the future. Second, the approach can be deployed in a variety of interviewing use cases, with the aim of rooting out deception. Third, the use of such an approach can help in preventing bias and foster fairness in employment decisions. Chatbots have come into common use. They have also met with a mixed reception. Can they be improved to meet with a higher approval rate by their conversational counterparts, the humans? Ryan M. Schuetzler, G. Mark Grimes, and Justin Scott Giboney ground themselves in the social presence theory to assess a range of chatbots, also known as conversational agents, with respect to their conversational skill, and the consequent user engagement and perceived “humanness.” The human attraction to anthropomorphic IT has been found contingent in prior research. The differences among the perception by the users of the agents considered in the paper are notable. The authors find that small improvements can lead to a highly improved human reception. There is no reason chatbots cannot be made more attractive to us with an enhanced conversational skill. Anyone familiar with Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA Rogerian analyst, a chatbot avant la lettre, now some 55 years of age, knows this task is well within the human ken.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2005)
This issue opens the twenty-second volume of JMIS, in a significantly expanded format. The expansion will give us a further opportunity to contribute to our field. Owing to your support as readers, authors, reviewers, and editors, the Journal has been experiencing a continuing growth of excellent contributions. In pragmatic terms, the thicker issues will help us avoid publication delays for the accepted papers—a commitment we consider necessary, given the technology-driven nature of our field. The translation of individual-level skills into a group phenomenon is the subject of the first paper in the issue. Amrit Tiwana and Ephraim R. McLean investigate empirically how the creativity of a development team working on an information system (IS) project arises from the expertise of the team members. Achieving creative solutions to IS problems is important in itself. Beyond that, the integrative processes that give rise to the—desirably, positive—outcomes at higher levels of analysis are of vast importance in the study of intellectual capital creation, and this work is of significance. The next paper, by Weidong Xia and Gwanhoo Lee, also addresses IS development projects. The authors produced and extensively validated a model reflecting the complexity of these projects. A combination of organizational and technological factors, along with structural and time-dependent determinants, all produce the sparse set of 15 metrics of the model. It is of obvious use in project risk and cost estimation, and in an IS portfolio analysis. The model will be, no doubt, further refined by considering the complexity of the development stages, for example. A different metric-oriented model is being offered and validated by Jerry Cha-Jan Chang and William R. King. Called a functional scorecard, it aims to measure the performance of the IS function in supporting the organizational processes, goals, and long-term performance. The work is encompassing in its purpose. When taken together with the model presented by Xia and Lee, the two measurement tools will help in understanding how the organizational IS can be controlled, and they are the instruments of such control. Two papers bring up vividly the importance of group norms in the organizational use of IS. System implementation has always been problematic, and perhaps never more so than in the case of systems whose use relies almost exclusively on the potential user’s volition. Although it is true that many IS implementations that expect user compliance fail by not considering the discretionary aspect of use, the systems whose use is entirely voluntary need to evince deep user commitment. The sources of such commitment are investigated here by Yogesh Malhotra and Dennis Galletta. The authors present a model of commitment to use, rooted in the social influence theory. The interplay of personal values and the ever-important group norms is analyzed to surface subtle distinctions between the factors leading to the adoption and those leading to the continuing use of a system. Group norms loom large also in the analysis of workplace use of information technology offered by Michael J. Gallivan, Valerie K. Spitler, and Marios Koufaris. Once again, the usual implementation facilitation, and training in particular, is found wanting in its outcomes. Rather, the authors show empirically the importance of social processes that translate the coworkers’ use of technology into its use by their colleagues. This work, when taken together with the preceding paper, should lead to a reconsideration of our analytical and pragmatic approaches to IS implementation and infusion. There have been many and various analytical explanations offered for IS outsourcing. James A. Hall and Stephen L. Liedtka present here another—and a very interesting—one. The publicly available data for 51 firms, when analyzed by the researchers, suggest that the financial incentives available to the CEOs significantly influence the decisions to outsource. In other words, difficult-to-reverse large-scale outsourcing decisions can be traced to managerial self-interest. In the light of this finding, it behooves corporations to review the compensation structure with this bias in mind, and to provide board oversight over large-scale IS outsourcing decisions. The remaining papers in the issue deal with various aspects of e-commerce, in its entire spectrum from the electronic marketplaces to supply chain management. Khawaja A. Saeed, Varun Grover, and Yujong Hwang show that e-commerce competence is associated with a superior organizational performance, and explain the mediating factors of that relationship. The authors provide their conceptualization of e-commerce competence and employ a broad view of organizational performance, both in the short and in the long runs. The work of G. Premkumar, K. Ramamurthy, and Carol Stoak Saunders addresses the context of interorganizational supply chains. The authors deploy information processing theory to model the construct of fit between the information processing needs of a firm and its information processing capabilities. The study expands the theoretical foundations of our discipline, and will no doubt engender further refinement of the capability side of the notion of fit. Michael R. Galbreth, Salvatore T. March, Gary D. Scudder, and Mikhael Shor present a model of participation growth in e-marketplaces, predicated on the network effects creating increasing value for the participants, if the virtuous upward spiral is reached. The intermediary marketplaces serving as the context here have struggled, and very many of them have failed. Using a game-theoretic model, the authors show how various parameters, such as the costs of intermediation, and the pricing reactions of sellers and buyers, can lead to desirable equilibria. The prerequisites of e-commerce success, but in an entirely different governance setting, are also targeted by the work of Jai-Yeol Son, Sridhar Narasimhan, and Frederick J. Riggins. The authors investigate empirically some of the factors leading to effective supplier–customer relationships enabled by electronic data interchange (EDI). As newer technologies are slowly taken up by the organizations, EDI remains the workhorse of the interorganizational systems. The authors show that the cooperative approaches, including reciprocal investments—as opposed to the one-sided exercise of power—lead to successful arrangements. Web-based commerce presents extensive opportunities of differentiation by offering an augmented product, with the original product converted by inclusion of services and experiences into a bundle, by intent distinctive in the marketplace. In fact, the ability to extract profits in e-markets depends to a great degree on the ability to offer such augmented products. Ramnath K. Chellappa and K. Ravi Kumar examine analytically the pricing and long-term customer retention strategies in devising augmented products. The authors state recommendations to the vendors on the extent to which the augmenting services should be offered cost-effectively to maintain customer loyalty. This is an important contribution to our thinking about product offerings in e-marketplaces. The conclusion of another volume of the Journal is always an occasion to thank our reviewers as the primary guarantors of quality. The Journal’s expansion makes it an excellent occasion. Here are the JMIS referees: Niv Ahituv Pervaiz Alam Paul Alpar Donald L. Amoroso Murugan Anandarajan Hayward P. Andres Dorine Andrews Solomon Antony Yoris Au Sulin Ba Barbro Back Akhilesh Bajaj P.R. Balasubramanian Dirk Baldwin Donald P. Ballou Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay Indranil R. Bardhan Reza Barkhi Henri Barki Stuart J. Barnes Dinesh Batra Irma Becerra-Fernandez Salvatore Belardo Skip Benamati Michael Benaroch Raquel Benbunan-Fich Samuel Bendahan François Bergeron Hemant Bhargava Anol Bhattacherjee Sudip Bhattacherjee M. Brian Blake Gilbert Bock Indranil Bose Robert M. Brown Glenn J. Browne Jeffrey Butterfield Terry A. Byrd Edward G. Cale, Jr. Sven Carlsson Houston H. Carr William J. Carroll Robert P. Cerveny Sergio de Cesare Jerry Cha-Jan Chang Debabroto Chatterjee Patrick Chau Ramnath K. Chellappa Hong-Mei Chen Kuan Chen Minder Chen Hsing Kenneth Cheng Robert T.H. Chi Roger Chiang Alina M. Chircu William C. Chismar Jong-min Choe H. Michael Chung Wingyan Chung Theodore H. Clark Roger Clarke Randolph Cooper Qizhi Dai Ronald Dattero Donald L. Davis Bruce Dehning Gordon Depledge Sarv Devaraj Rajiv M. Dewan Gisela von Dran Peter Duchessi Omar A. El Sawy Sean B. Eom J. Alberto Espinosa Ming Fan Bijan Fazlollahi Steven Feiner Eliezer M. Fich Kirk Fiedler Edmond P. Fitzgerald Jerry Fjermestad Steven W. Floyd Chiara Francalanci Michael R. Galbreth Dennis Galletta Gordon Gao Edward J. Garrity Judith Gebauer David Gefen Paulo B. Goes Janis L. Gogan Thomas Goh Dale Goodhue Ram D. Gopal Sanjay Gosain Martin D. Goslar Paul Gray Saul Greenberg Robert K. Griffin Michael D. Grigoriades Bin Gu Kemal Guler Alok Gupta Jungpil Hahn Barbara Haley James A. Hall Ingoo Han Paul Hart Stephen Hayne Ann Hickey Starr Roxanne Hiltz Rudy Hirschheim Richard Hoffman John A. Hoxmeier Paul Hu Qing Hu Wayne Huang Cary Hughes Kai Lung Hui Ard Huizing E. Gerald Hurst Zahir Irani Gretchen I. Irwin Bharat A. Jain James J. Jiang Alice Johnson Linda Ellis Johnson Kailash Joshi Boris Jukiæ Nenad Jukiæ Charles Kacmar Surinder Kahai Timo Kakola Ajit Kambil P.K. Kannan Jahangir Karimi Michael Kattan Timothy Kayworth Julie E. Kendall William J. Kettinger Omar E.M. Khalil Melody Y. Kiang Ruth King Rajiv Kishore Gary Klein Rajiv Kohli Esther Koster Marios Koufaris Kenneth A. Kozar Kenneth L. Kraemer Allan Krebs Ramayya Krishnan Uday Kulkarni Akhil Kumar Ram Kumar Mary C. Lacity Simon S.K. Lam Karl R. Lang Tor J. Larsen Kathy S. Lassila Heeseok Lee Ho Geun Lee Jungwoo Lee Yang Lee Zoonky Lee Dorothy Leidner Richard Leifer Jan Marco Leimeister Katherine N. Lemon Mary Jane Lenard Hugo Levecq Ting-Peng Liang Stephen L. Liedtka Nancy Lightner John Lim Kai Lim Yihwa Irene Liou Astrid Lipp Henry C. Lucas, Jr. Mark Lycett Kalle Lyytinen William McCarthy Jane M. Mackay Roy McKelvey D. Harrison McKnight Ephraim R. McLean Poppy L. McLeod Simha R. Magal M. Adam Mahmood Arvind Malhotra Yogesh Malhotra Ji-Ye Mao Salvatore T. March Ivan Marsic Anne P. Massey Charles H. Mawhinney Jerrold H. May Roberto J. Mejias Shaila Miranda Rajesh Mirani Ali R. Montazemi Ramiro Montealegre Jeanette Moody Steven Morris Jolene Morrison Michael D. Myers Peter P. Mykytyn, Jr. Barin N. Nag Murli Nagasundaram R. Ryan Nelson Boon Siong Neo Fred Niederman Mark Nissen Rosalie Ocker Wonseok Oh Bob O’Keefe Lorne Olfman James Oliver Levent Orman Carl Pacini Jonathan W. Palmer Raymond R. Panko Michael Parent Jeffrey Parsons Souren Paul David J. Pauleen Paul A. Pavlou Kenneth Peffers Norman Pendegraft Mark Pendergast Robin Pennington Roger A. Pick Leo L. Pipino Mitzi G. Pitts Jean-Charles Pomerol Gerald Post John H. Prager G. Premkumar Sandeep Purao Jim J. Quan S. Raghunathan Arik Ragowsky T.S. Ragu-Nathan Arun Rai Rex Kelly Rainer, Jr. K. Ramamurthy K.S. Raman B. Ramesh Neil C. Ramiller Richard G. Ramirez Bharat Rao H.R. Rao R. Ravichandran T. Ravichandran Sury Ravindran Amy W. Ray Louis Raymond Paul Resnick Hyuen-Suk Rhee Vernon Richardson William B. Richmond Frederick Riggins Suzanne Rivard Daniel Robey Michael B. Rogich Nicholas C. Romano, Jr. Sherry D. Ryan Young U. Ryu Timo Saarinen Rajiv Sabherwal G. Lawrence Sanders Radhika Santhanam Carol Saunders Naveed Saleem Surendra Sarnikar George Schell Petra Schubert Judy Scott Ravi Sen Kishore Sengupta Vikram Sethi Theresa M. Shaft Jim Sheffield Olivia Sheng Morgan M. Shepherd Michael Shields Siew Kien Sia Atish P. Sinha Sumit Sircar H. Jeff Smith Michael D. Smith Charles A. Snyder Toni M. Somers Jai-Yeol Son William E. Spangler Valerie K. Spitler Rajendra P. Srivastava Thomas F. Stafford Stephen Standifird Sandy Staples Eric W. Stein Dick Stenmark Lee Stepina John M. Stevens Mani Subramani Girish Subramanian Ramesh Subramanian Robert T. Sumichrast Shankar Sunarajan Arun Sundararajan Shankar Sundaresan Tae Kyung Sung Roderick I. Swaab Edward J. Szewczak Paul P. Tallon Kar Yan Tam Bernard C.Y. Tan Yao-Hua Tan Mohan R. Tanniru Alfred Taudes Nolan Taylor David P. Tegarden Gary F. Templeton James T.C. Teng Hock-Hai Teo Thompson Teo Jason B. Thatcher Matthew Thatcher Ron Thompson James Y.L. Thong John Tillquist Amrit Tiwana Gholamreza Torkzadeh Leon van der Torre Jonathan K. Trower Duane Truex Gregory E. Truman Yanbin Tu Ilkka Tuomi Brad Tuttle Tuure Tuunanen N.S. Umanath Andrew Urbaczewski Rustam Vahidov Yaniv Vakrat Vasja Vehovar Viswanath Venkatesh Michael Wade Steven Walczak Zhiping Walter Bin Wang Michael S. Wang Shouhong Wang Y. Richard Wang Carol Watson Mary Beth Watson-Manheim Thomas Weber Chih-Ping Wei Charles E. Wells John Wells Larry West J. Christopher Westland Seungjin Whang Michael E. Whitman Jeffrey L. Whitten George Widmeyer Fons Wijnhoven Charles Willow Barbara Wixom Charles A. Wood Hans Wortmann D.J. Wu Mu Xia Weidong Xia Christopher Yang Byungjoon Yoo Han Zhang Ping Zhang J. Leon Zhao Lina Zhou Kevin Zhu Ilze Zigurs Moshe Zviran Let us now turn our attention to the—expanded—journal. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2018)
Information technology (IT) outsourcing has become a default way of doing business for many firms. The nature of the outsourcing has changed as well, in many cases, extending well beyond the resource arbitrage, where cost-savings or access to expertise are the primary aims. Through IT outsourcing arrangements, many organizations now pursue strategic goals of competing in the marketplace. This vastly increases the stakes as the potential benefits and risks to the outsourcing client rise; as the context of the outsourcing contracts becomes more complex; and as the relationship between the client and supplier over the time of the contract is more entangled. During earlier times when non-strategic needs were addressed, IT outsourcing contracts were, by their nature, incomplete and left much to the execution, with many non-contractible contracts. The far more complex strategic outsourcing of today calls for the specification of and investment in formal controls that aim at incentive alignment between the two parties and for coordination and monitoring of actions over the long run of the contract. The more intricate outsourcing relationships and contracts also call for more nuanced research in the outsourcing-controls domain. In the opening paper of the issue, Nishtha Langer and Deepa Mani present such a study: They examine empirically the differential effects of activity controls, output controls, and capability controls on the client’s satisfaction and on the project profitability. The deployment of a rich longitudinal dataset of strategic outsourcing contracts executed by a major outsourcer helps the researchers to expand our knowledge of the domain and to offer guidance to organizations. Dispersed, or virtual, teams are widely deployed. And yet, as they rely largely on IT rather than personal interaction, these teams encounter multiple challenges stemming from this fact. There are many virtues here that collocated teams do not offer; these advantages may include round-the-clock operation, access to locally unavailable expertise, and enhanced diversity. However, the absence of social interaction has a negative effect and needs to be compensated for to the extent possible. The perception of (un)fairness in the organizational treatment of team members coheres into the (in)justice climate perceived by the team as a body. In the next paper, Massimo Magni, Manju K. Ahuja, and Likoebe M. Maruping study the effects of the intra-team justice climate on the performance of virtual teams. The authors find that procedural justice has perceptible effects on team performance and alleviates to an extent the drawbacks of team dispersion. As IT permeates our working and private lives, the dark side of its use becomes ever more obvious and does not escape the attention of the researchers in several disciplines. The authors of the next paper use systematics approach to categorize organizational cyberdeviance. Such categorization lays a foundation for further study and for the development of the appropriate countermeasures. Srinivasan Venkatraman, Christy M.K. Cheung, Zach W.Y. Lee, Fred D. Davis, and Viswanath Venkatesh offer an integrated typology of cyberdeviance that links the extant research programs and can serve to inform the future research, as well as to formulate public policy and create focused organizational actions. With the advance of IT and of the information systems that we organize with these many and varied technologies, the locus of a great variety of decisions is shifting toward the “machines.” How do we choose, apportion, and organize such joint human-machine decision making? Our field has much to offer to this key research program. Here, Junius Gunaratne, Lior Zalmanson, and Oded Nov contribute by empirically comparing the persuasiveness of the algorithmic advice of the “machines” with the human advice of the “crowds.” Along with the advice itself, the source of the advice is known to the decision taker. Algorithms are found to be more persuasive in the context actualized by these researchers. This work opens a wide research avenue in our understanding of human-machine decision making and decision taking. Another approach to the multi-source recommendations is the subject of investigation by the authors of the next paper, Junpeng Guo, Wenxiang Zhang, Weiguo Fan, and Wenhua Li. They study the integration of the online social influences with geographical information to produce personalized point-of-interest recommendations. This type of recommendations may prove to be a key to success (or failure, if inadequate) of mobile commerce enterprises, including tourism and hotel services, and of the related advertisements. The authors demonstrate how deep learning can be harnessed in such integration of the social recommendation with the location information. The authors show the superiority of their approach and open another avenue to the combination of various forms of decision-making information. Although the gig economy relies on various types of short-term engagement, its emblem has become the crowdwork on the Amazon Mechanical Turk style. The authors of the next paper in this issue, Xiao Ma, Lara Khansa, and Sung S. Kim, characterize the working conditions of MTurk as challenging. Outside of the MTurk scope, its crowdworkers are involved in their online communities. The paper analyzes the turnover of crowdworkers, which, unsurprisingly, is high. The research question posed by the authors is: How does the participation of the crowdworkers in their autonomous online communities influence their turnover intentions? What makes this question even more interesting is that the people participate in two interrelated yet institutionally independent online social contexts, crowdwork and purposeful social interaction. The ability to compensate with online interaction with their peers for the alienating circumstances of their work should affect the workers’ turnover intentions. In a much richer theoretical paper than recast here, the authors contribute to our theoretical understanding of the dual-context online behavior and to the practice of organizing crowdwork, which is here to stay. Another aspect of co-creation in the online economy is the subject of study by Mahdi Moqri, Xiaowei Mei, Liangfei Qiu, and Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay. Deploying a unique longitudinal dataset, the researchers investigate the effect of online following on the members’ contribution in the communities producing open source software (OSS). The effect is positive, which shows the importance of social factors as contribution motivators. Moreover, freelancers are affected more strongly in this direction than the contributors who are employed, which points to a monetary career-related motivation in OSS contributions. This is a step forward to our understanding of the rich motivational spectrum in co-creation and is also a source of advice to the OSS platforms. One of the attributes our economy has acquired over the recent decades of information overabundance is that of attention economy. Much of that attention is garnered by the marketers plying us with onscreen product descriptions and online advertisements. In a competitive environment, the natural question to ask is how one can capture more of that attention. In a fine-grained research project, Jae-Hyeon Ahn, Yoon-Soo Base, Jaehyon Ju, and Wonseok Oh use eye-tracking experiments—as well as a strong theoretical base—to examine the consumers’ allocation of attention to the product choices displayed during an online search. The direct access to the users’ eye movements allows the researchers to establish how these potential consumers husband their attention resources in the patterns of adjustment and renewal. Marketers may be surprised to find that about 80% of the product choices displayed receives no attention at all. The deplorable practice of launching software products with known and severe software defects is not uncommon. This is often done to meet the time-to-market or other release deadline. As software becomes the lifeblood of products and organizations, much attention must be paid to eradicate this practice. Here, Hyung Koo Lee, Jong Seok Lee, and Mark Keil explore a novel approach to accomplishing this. They propose to use the escalation-of-commitment idea in reverse to de-escalate the commitment of product managers to a launch date for the software product, when defects are known to remain. The novelty of the proposed approach is the psychological tactic of inducing the product managers to take the view of the future users of their product. Laboratory experiments show that the approach works under the conditions created. This stimulating study opens a new line of research on the application of perspective-taking in our field. The concluding paper of the issue, by Anton Ivanov and Raj Sharman, casts light on the influence of the user-generated content (UGC) online on the reputation and financial performance of a critically important segment of hospitals. The authors contextualize a conceptual reputation model in an interesting way and arrive at the results that are significant to our understanding of the role of co-creation in the forming of organizational reputations. It is gratifying to see that the UGC reputation for quality (rather than online prominence) is a strong predictor of financial performance. Based on their work, the researchers are able to offer the guidelines to the healthcare providers on enhancing their reputation. The feedback loop constituted by UGC can and should be deployed to improve the factors underlying that reputation.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1988)

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
The Special Section opening this issue of JMIS calls our attention to the complexity of software that runs our enterprises and their products. This is a weighty topic that is implicitly addressed by numerous research studies performed by our field, but meets with a minimal amount of sustained explicit attention. There is extensive air space between the theoretical complexity theory and its variants, such as dynamic systems complexity, computational complexity, programming complexity, and others, on the one hand, and the complexity of the human-machine systems, increasingly run by software either produced or assimilated by our enterprises, on the other hand. Our sociotechnical field can have great input. Let us consider the following. The size of the software assets of Google, one of the firms that are largely constituted by their software assets, has over 2 billion lines of code [9]. The interconnectivity among the software-run systems, if defined by the Internet, is many billions of dynamic connections. The number of human actors who have access to these systems, mostly for the good and in some cases for the ill, runs to several billions. The number of the entities in the systems, if enveloped by the sensors and actuators of the Internet of Things, goes into tens or hundreds of billions. Our dependence on the software-run grids that run our energy, water, healthcare, and other services is vast and growing. Indeed, like the driverless vehicles that are in the offing, these grids will be increasingly autonomous (in a simple reading, run by software). The decision-making capabilities of software-data-hardware subsystems relying on deep learning are increasing apace, and the redistribution of work from humans toward these subsystems raises serious concerns about human employability, or even the supersession of the human agency. The impactfulness can be gauged by the potential use of software in cyber-hostilities of a great variety. And the speed of action, if defined by the number of states per unit of time (to revert to theoretical complexity), is growing on the persisting Moore’s curve (riding on nanosheets at present). In fact, that curve is overridden by the artificial neural network chips whose power doubles every few months. Even if we believe that we are dealing here with organized complexity, to use Weaver’s distinction [10], the extent and depth of this rapid growth is daunting and challenging the dichotomy he proposed over seventy years ago. There is an obvious need to bridge the chasm between the impressive intellectual achievements of the theoretical complexity science and the concerns that have to be devoted to the complexity of the organization of the human-computer systems. Significant progress has been indeed made over decades in computer science to manage programming complexity, with several methodologies that making very large programs possible. Similar progress is necessary in the study of complex sociotechnical systems. Questions to be addressed by our research in this domain include in the first order the complexity-dependent robustness and resilience of large human-machine systems, the complexity-driven task apportionment and interfaces in such systems, strategic options rendered by complexity management, organizational capabilities furnished by various degrees of information systems (IS) complexity and the cost-benefit trade-offs, flexibility and complexity, realistic complexity measures, and a host of others. There is a certain body of work in our and cognate fields to build on toward the results that can address these issue. As one example, further research is needed to build on the systems-architectural work of Baldwin and her colleagues [3, 6]; insights can be gained from complexity economics innovated by Arthur [1]; and the inclusion of complexity analysis in the design-science methodological guidance [7] would be important. As I have written this, I note that scholarly attention is being paid to the related issue of organizational complexity in the digital era [4]. We need to endogenize humans and the various degrees of human organizations in our analyses and syntheses of very large and emerging systems. Design science is only one of our discipline’s methodologies aimed at complexity management. This work is of a great moment. As Lessig [5] told us two decades ago, the code is a normative that regulates us, which has been amplified by the recent analysis by Pistor [8] who asserts that the software code competes with the code of law. With the advent of autonomous vehicles, drones, and similar devices, their software may be making ethical decisions we consider inhering in humans [2]. They may not be programmed by us if they are made in real time by (non-transparent) deep-learning systems. We have observed the failures of flights, where pilot-plane systems have failed, arguably due to the complexity of the overall system (and yes, training is — or should be — endogenous to such a system). Guest Editors Robert O. Briggs and Jay F. Nunamaker Jr. have included three papers in their Special Section on The Growing Complexity of Enterprise Software. With blockchain technology heralded as the highly promising decentralized infrastructure for cryptocurrencies and other transactional systems, there are numerous fundamental questions about the governance, as novel approaches will be needed to organize and manage the emerging complexity. The first paper of the Special Section investigates the corresponding decision issues. The second paper deals with cognitive load in the context of the crowdsourcing of innovations. The cognitive load is a crucial aspect of human agency in complex systems, and the authors elaborate this construct, with the empirics focusing on germane cognitive load that can durably support the human performance. With information technology supporting the ever higher levels of multitasking, the authors of the third paper establish empirically that the effect on deception detection in collaborative teamwork is quite salutary. The Guest Editors further introduce the papers to you. In the first paper of the general section, Abhishek Kathuria, Prasanna P. Karhade, and Benn R. Konsynski develop a multi-level theory to explain the supplier participation on two-sided digital platforms, using the restaurants’ participation on food-delivery platforms as the case in point. As well known, the offerors of two-sided platforms generally need to attract, often by incentivizing, one of the sides to the transactions that will be supported by the platform. Here, the researchers focus on the study, from multiple theoretical perspectives, of the decisions made by the supplier restaurants in their consideration of a digital food-delivery platform. Several predictors of this participation are surfaced by the analysis, along with the comprehensive novel approach to the study of platform use. Mobile commerce is to many of us the face of e-commerce, and mobile couponing is a prominent form of location-based advertising. While the push format of this couponing is generally considered intrusive, the mobile pull is far more acceptable. And yet the extant research work has focused on push advertising. Thus, the study of pull advertising is highly contributing, and is presented here by Dominik Molitor, Martin Spann, Anindya Ghose, and Philipp Reichhart. The researchers study the effects of the choice architecture, that is, of the presentation of options to the potential customer via the interface design. This being location-based advertising, the options revolve around the display of distance-related information. In an extensive randomized field experiment, the authors surface the effective ways to design the mobile couponing interface and attract the users to the offering. Hongyi Zhu, Sagar Samtani, Hsinchun Chen, and Jay F. Nunamaker Jr. contribute to our understanding and practice of healthtech with their design-science based system for the monitoring of activities of daily living. The multi-sensor system allows for the identification of individuals within a multi-resident setting in an unobtrusive, privacy-preserving fashion. The work brings to this task a novel deep transfer learning approach using a convolutional neural network. Rigorous tests against the competing systems show the superiority of the approach taken here. Notably, the superior performance is exhibited even with a small labeled data set. The work expands our prior knowledge in several directions and has the potential to be retargeted at a number of other settings where individuals need to be supported against the background of human aggregations. Informational cascades in software adoption, that is following and imitating the behavior of others, foreclose a proper analysis of options and may lead to adopting suboptimal, for the given adopter, software. This undesirable phenomenon results in the users’ not availing themselves of better apps and leads to misallocation of resources. In the context of apps, this herding behavior manifests itself in the discontinuance of use in a rather short interval after such adoption. Here, Xia Zhao, Jing Tian, and Ling Xue approach the study of this decision-making deficiency with the aid of an extensive data set on post-adoption discontinuance of app use. The study introduces a number of unobvious conclusions regarding the effects of user ratings, app rankings, and app complexity. Two subsequent papers contribute to our understanding of co-creation. The first of these, by Liang Chen, Pei Xu, and De Liu, is set within the context of crowdsourcing contests, where creative ideas are sought. The winners may be selected by a panel of experts or by crowd voting. The researchers deploy several theoretical lenses to study the effects of a second approach, which has been gaining influence. As the major finding, the authors establish that crowd voting positively and significantly affects the extent and the breadth of contest participation. They also present several additional results that should encourage contest offerors to employ this mode either as the principal one or a supplementary to an expert judgment. Conferring recognition, such as badges, on members of user communities in order to encourage participation is a related, if less cognitively laden, issue. In their work, Samadrita Bhattacharyya, Shankhadeep Banerjee, Indranil Bose, and Atreyi Kankanhalli investigate the longer-time effects of such recognition or multiple recognitions. Relying on reinforcement theory, and an extensive quasi-experiment on one of the large business-review sites, the authors present several results regarding the behavior of both recognized members (particularly those recognized several times) and of those worthy of recognition that is withheld from them. Reading this together with the preceding paper, we gain a more granular understanding of the behavior of individuals co-creating value in online aggregations. The concluding paper of the issue analyzes the online-to-offline (O2O) business model of e-commerce, under which the customers acquired online are directed by the intermediary platforms to the appropriate offline stores. The suppliers offer coupons on the platforms and the customers need to make shopping decisions based on the deals offered and the physical locations of the stores. There are very many coupons and there are many participating suppliers: hence, recommenders are in order. Yuchen Pan and Desheng Wu present a novel approach to recommendations under these circumstances, where there are many alternative customer-supplier dyads and the rating data is sparse. The approach relies on establishing the networks of customers who co-use the suppliers, with rating matrices available, and combining these with the physical location of the business. The comparisons with the pre-existing recommendation models are favorable.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1999)
SEVERAL PAPERS OPENING THE PRESENT ISSUE RELATE TO ORGANIZATIONAL knowledge management. Information systems that offer support in this area, known as knowledge management systems, have become possible with the growing capabilities of computer systems and, in particular, with exponentially expanding connectivity among them. This support has become necessary as organizational knowledge has been recognized to be a principal source of competitive advantage. A broad organizational initiative is called for in leveraging knowledge to achieve strategic goals. Knowledge management has been defined as the development and operation of organizational methods, procedures, and information systems that are used to collect and share the knowledge and experience of the members of the organization, as well as to elaborate and disseminate external knowledge, and to bring this knowledge to bear on problems and opportunities [5]. Corporate knowledge spans a vast area that covers, among other things, know-how, much of it in the realm of tacit knowledge, the distributed stores of electronic documents, and intellectual property. Companies in different lines of business, such as Arthur Andersen, Monsanto, and Buckman Labs, have become exemplars in strategically deploying knowledge management with extensive information system support. A vast array of software products for the purpose have come to the market. Various products in this category enable corporate knowledge portals, tap into the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to provide the knowledge needed to carry out business processes, provide access to firms' experts by expertise profiling, automatically tag, classify, and index electronic documents to make them available over intranets, organize group memories, and serve myriad other tasks that integrate the networks of organizational knowledge. Yet software products do not knowledge management make, as our definition given above will tell you. Much thinking about organizational knowledge as a resource, possibly reflected on balance sheets [2], and much system thinking and information system building needs to be done. The Special Section devoted to data mining, whose Guest Editors are H. Michael Chung and Paul Gray, highlights the techniques that can lead to the discovery of new elements of organizational knowledge from databases. The three papers included in the Special Section make distinct contributions here. The first of them offers a prototype system that assists users in hypothesizing relationships among data in databases and in obtaining an initial indication of the hypotheses validity, and thus in potentially expanding the organizational store of knowledge if the hypotheses are later verified. The second paper studies the adequacy of the well-known data-classification methods for the data that belong to multiple categories. The final paper of the section uses a data-mining approach to develop bankruptcy prediction models suitable, respectively, for a normally operating economy and for crisis conditions prevailing recently in some parts of the world; the predictions are accompanied by an explanation of conclusions, which knowledge is highly useful to financing institutions. In their introduction, the Special Section Guest Editors offer a fine introduction indeed both to the data mining and to the research on the subject. Recent market valuation of companies with vast data warehouses available for data mining tells us about its strategic importance [1]. In the paper that opens the general section of the issue, Timo K. K„k"l„ and Kalle I. Koota present a conceptual design and a prototype of an information system expressly developed from the standpoint of supporting the creation of organizational knowledge and fostering double-loop learning. The paper is deeply rooted in philosophical and other theoretical work that it invokes-it is indeed a paper with a point of view. The work specifies and exemplifies with a prototype the design principles of an information system that would facilitate the sharing of organizational knowledge about work processes and refining it during the reflective practice with the use of the system. This raises the bar for higher-level performance in the future. The authors also discuss the tenets of a knowledge-based organization that would benefit most from such an information system and of the methods for work-process benchmarking that would serve to continually ratchet up the organization's performance. The work in the area of knowledge management overlaps with that on the information system support for organizational memory. An organization may develop an Organizational Memory Information System (OMIS) to manage its own appropriated knowledge effectively in all its aspects. The underpinning of an OMIS is a broad design theory, grounded in the competing values model of organizational effectiveness, within which many contingency-dependent implementations are possible [4]. The process of an OMIS development can take many paths; indeed, considering the nature of the system and the fact that it emerges over a long period of time, it would be surprising if any two such trajectories coincided. Nevertheless, in his paper, Fons Wijnhoven is able to identify several variables that form an origin of a contingency-based theory of OMIS development. He partly induces this contingency framework from the analysis of three cases. Wijnhoven also discusses the relationships between the support of organizational memory and knowledge management. Taken together, the above papers make a collective contribution to help us think about the information system support for organizational knowledge management more conceptually, yet without departing from the organizational realities. In the next paper, Magid Igbaria and Tor Guimaraes empirically compare the intentions of telecommuters and those of office dwellers to quit their job. The authors develop a research model that relates job stressors to the overall satisfaction levels, and thus to the turnover intention. With information technology the essential enabler in telecommuting, the results the authors obtain are both interesting theoretically and highly relevant to MIS managers' thinking. Surinder S. Kahai and Randolph B. Cooper study the effect of the use of computer-mediated communication systems, a class of information systems that includes group support systems, on the outcome of a group process. More specifically, they study the effect of the aspects surrounding the problem-solving communication on the agreement ("yes, I want this") or acceptance ("OK, I will go along for now") by participants. The difference between the two attitudes with respect to the implementation of a decision is clear. This work helps us draw certain conclusions as to how to promote a true agreement rather than end up with acquiescence and possible subversion of a decision through counterimplemention. The paper by Choong Nyoung Kim and Raymond McLeod, Jr., makes a contribution to the area of expert modeling, that is, modeling how decisions are made by a human expert. The authors compare the performance of several models with that of human experts and analyze the results with respect to predictive validity innovatively using a concept of the validity of the decision strategy. This work can lead to a further refinement of expert-system performance. The adoption of technologies in less-developed countries (LDCs) is heavily dependent on the role that these countries' institutions, as well as the international community, play-or fail to play. Ramiro Montealegre empirically validates a temporal model of institutional intervention in the adoption of information technologies in LDCs derived from [3]. Montealegre analyzes the process of the adoption of the Internet in four Latin American countries. He introduces a convincing argument that a number of deficiencies that would appear inevitably to delay such an adoption can in fact be overcome if a number of right institutional actions are undertaken. This is certainly a word to the wise. As the Journal enters its sixteenth year of publication, which will bring us into a new millenium to boot, it is my pleasure and privilege to uphold our tradition and thank the Editorial Board, authors, readers, and technical editors of JMIS for their contribution. As always, particular thanks are offered to the Journal's reviewers, who are the primary guarantors of its quality. These are the referees of the Journal of Management Information Systems: Tarek K. Abdel-Hamid Ritu Agarwal Pervaiz Alam Murugan Anandarajan Urton Anderson Lynda M. Applegate Gad Ariav Yiorgos D. Athanassatos Paul Attewell Barbro Back Yannis Bakos P.R. Balasubramanian Dirk Baldwin Dinesh Batra Salvatore Belardo Michael Benaroch Francois Bergeron Bijoy Bordoloi Bruce E. Breeding Carol V. Brown Robert M. Brown Terry A. Byrd Anthony G. Cahill Edward G. Cale, Jr. John V. Carlis Judith Carlisle Sven Carlsson Erran Carmel Houston H. Carr William J. Carroll Robert P. Cerveny Patrick Chau Hong-Mei Chen Minder Chen Hsing Kenneth Cheng Robert T.H. Chi Roger Chiang William C. Chismar Jong-min Choe Joobin Choobineh H. Michael Chung Jon D. Clark Roger Clarke Sue Conger Randy Cooper Timothy P. Cronan David C. Croson Paul Cule Ronald Dattero Donald L. Davis Alan Dennis Sandra Dewitz Ali Dogramaci Brian L. Dos Santos Peter Duchessi Phillip Ein-Dor Omar A. El Sawy Gregg Elofson Hyun B. Eom Steven Feiner Kirk Fiedler Jerry Fjermestad Michael Flam Steven W. Floyd Edward Fox Nelson Fraiman Richard Furuta Michael J. Gallivan Edward J. Garrity Bezalel Gavish Erol Gelenbe Mark Ginsburg Janis L. Gogan Jerry Golub Martin D. Goslar Paul Gray Gary I. Green Saul Greenberg Robert K. Griffin Michael D. Grigoriades Varun Grover Tor Guimaraes Jatinder N.D. Gupta Joanne E. Hale Jacob Hagouel Il-Horn Hann Paul Hart Stephen Hayne Roxanne Starr Hiltz Rudy Hirschheim Lorin M. Hitt Richard Hoffman Qing Hu Cary T. Hughes Ard Huizing E. Gerald Hurst Tomasz Imielinski Gretchen I. Irwin Tomas Isakowitz Bharat A. Jain Marius A. Janson Matthias Jarke Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa Per V. Jenster Linda Ellis Johnson Roy Jones Stef Joosten Kailash Joshi Charles Kacmar Surinder Kahai Timo Kakola Ajit Kambil P.K. Kannan Jahangir Karimi Michael Kattan Mark Keil Robert T. Keim Chris Kemerer Julie E. Kendall William J. Kettinger Omar E.M. Khalil Melody Y. Kiang Ruth C. King Gary Klein Esther Koster Kenneth A. Kozar Ramayya Krishnan Uday Kulkarni Ram Kumar Mary C. Lacity Simon S.K. Lam Gwynne Larsen Tor J. Larsen Heeseok Lee Ho Geun Lee Jungwoo Lee Dorothy Leidner Richard Leifer Mary Jane Lenard Hugo Levecq Ting-Peng Liang Jack M. Ligon Yihwa Irene Liou Astrid Lipp Henry C. Lucas, Jr. Kalle Lyytinen William McCarthy Jane M. Mackay Roy McKelvey Ephraim R. McLean Poppy L. McLeod Gregory Madey Simha R. Magal Mo A. Mahmood David Maier Ji-Ye Mao Salvatore T. March Anne P. Massey Charles H. Mawhinney Roberto J. Mejias Robert Minch Shaila Miranda Rajesh Mirani William H. Money Ali R. Montazemi Janette Moody Ajay S. Mookerjee Scott Moore Michael D. Myers Kathleen Mykytyn Peter P. Mykytyn, Jr. Barin N. Nag Murli Nagasundaram R. Ryan Nelson Boon Siong Neo Rosalie Ocker Lorne Olfman James Oliver Levent Orman Richard Orwig Jonathan W. Palmer Raymond R. Panko Lee Papayanopoulos Michael Parent Diane Parente Daniel Pariveni Kenneth Peffers Norman Pendegraft Mark Pendergast Roger A. Pick Leo L. Pipino Robert Plant Steven Poltrock Gerald Post Jayesh Prasad G. Premkumar Sandeep Purao S. Raghunathan T.S. Raghunathan Arik Ragowsky Arun Rai Rex Kelly Rainer, Jr. Sudha Ram K.S. Raman B. Ramesh Richard G. Ramirez Renu Ramnarayanan H.R. Rao R. Ravichandran T. Ravichandran Sury Ravindran Amy W.Ray Louis Raymond Paul Resnick William B. Richmond Frederick Riggins Daniel Robey Michael C. Row David L. Russell Young U. Ryu Timo Saarinen Rajiv Sabherwal Sharon Salveter G. Lawrence Sanders Radhika Santhanam John Satzinger Carol Saunders Naveed Saleem George Schell K.D. Schenk Irmtraud S. Seeborg Arie Segev Kishore Sengupta Vikram Sethi Kenneth C. Sevcik Dennis G. Severance Theresa M. Shaft Steven Sheetz Jim Sheffield Olivia Sheng Michael Shields J.P. Shim Siew Kien Sia Mark S. Silver Atish P. Sinha Peggy C. Smith Charles A. Snyder Eric W. Stein John M. Stevens Veda Storey Ashok Subramanian Girish Subramanian Ramesh Subramanian Ephraim Sudit Robert T. Sumichrast Shankar Sunarajan Arun Sundararajan Julius Surkis Edward J. Szewczak Kar Yan Tam Bernard C.Y. Tan Mohan R. Tanniru Alfred Taudes David P. Tegarden James T.C. Teng Hock-Hai Teo Thompson Teo Matthew Thatcher Ron Thompson James Y.L. Thong John Tillquist Leon van der Torre Jonathan K. Trower Duane Truex Jon A. Turner Brad Tuttle Craig K. Tyran N.S. Umanath Ari Vepsalainen Boris S. Verkhovsky Iris Vessey Ajay Vinze Jason Wang Michael S. Wang Shouhong Wang Y. Richard Wang Yu-ming Wang Carol Watson Richard Watson Mary Beth Watson-Manheim Aaron Watters Bruce Weber Peter Weill Charles E. Wells Larry West J. Christopher Westland Seungjin Whang Michael E. Whitman George Widmeyer Kristoff K. Wolyniec Hans Wortmann Surya B. Yadav Beck Yang Chee Sing Yap Evangelos Yfantis Ilze Zigurs Moshe Zviran I trust you will find the papers interesting. VLADIMIR ZWASS Editor-in-Chief REFERENCES 1. Brannigan, M. Quintiles seeks mother lode in health "data mining." Wall Street Journal (March 2, 1999), B4. 2. Edvinson, L., and Malone, M.S. Intellectual Capital: Realizing Your Company's True Value by Finding Its Hidden Brainpower. New York: HarperBusiness, 1997. 3. King, J.L.; Gurbaxani, V.; Kraemer, K.L.; McFarlan, F.W.; Raman, K.S.; and Yap, C.S. Institutional factors in information technology innovation. Information Systems Research, 5, 2 (June 1994), 139-169. 4. Stein, E.W., and Zwass, V. Actualizing organizational memory with information systems. Information Systems Research, 6, 2 (June 1995), 85-117. 5. Zwass, V. Foundations of Information Systems. Boston: Irwin/McGraw-Hill, 1998. 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Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1993)

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2005)
The Special Section that opens this issue of JMIS, Volume 22, no. 2, provides economic analyses of the deployment of information systems (IS) in firms’ competitive strategies. The great varieties of sourcing possibilities—including offshoring; strategic pricing in e-commerce; electronic market designs; and the influence of IS standards on the industry structure—all are the targets of the studies. The Guest Editors, Robert J. Kauffman, Eric K. Clemons, and Rajiv M. Dewan, introduce the papers to you in depth. It is quite apparent from this work that those who wish to believe IS of no strategic importance to the competing enterprises do that at peril to their firms. In the first paper of the general section, Michael A. Chilton, Bill C. Hardgrave, and Deborah J. Armstrong study the performance of software developers as influenced by stress on the job. Continuing innovation in the IS software field is, of course, one of its primary characteristics. Some of that innovation even aims to relieve the cognitive stress of the practitioners. As we perceive, and as the authors argue, this stress is certainly unabating. The authors combine the theories of cognitive style and of person–environment fit to examine some reasons for this. They draw into our orbit an important body of literature from industrial psychology, which will serve us well in the future research in the domain. Practical suggestions for the IS managers emerge as well. Using the media-richness and related communication theories, Alice M. Johnson and Albert L. Lederer study empirically the influence of the communications between the chief executive and the chief information officers on reaching the vitally necessary mutual understanding between them. In some aspects, the authors also determine the influence of this convergence of views on the contribution of the IS unit to the financial well-being of the organization. Based on the results, recommendations are offered for the executives’ communication modes. The two concluding papers invite you to revisit the general theme of the Special Issue. Ganesh D. Bhatt and Varun Grover present an extensive typology of information technology (IT) capabilities from the vantage point of the seeking of competitive advantage by the owner firms. Organizational learning and the embeddedness of the IS unit in the firm’s business emerge as decisive corporate capabilities. The growth point of view is adopted by Sabyasachi Mitra in his study of the IT role in a firm. As operationalized by Mitra in his econometric research, IT infrastructure plays a central role in enabling the growth of firms in the future periods by lowering the costs of operations. There is a clear tension between these two studies. The concept of infrastructure is certainly due for a careful look. Good—the tension will prove creative in the future research. The Editorial Board and I note with great sadness the untimely passing of Gerardine DeSanctis. One of the preeminent scholars in our discipline, she has contributed several papers to this journal and was an outstanding graduate of the university where I teach. Her memory will abide in her work, to be continued and built on by many of us. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Special Section: Context-Driven Information Access and Deployment - Briggs, Robert O; De Vreede, Gert-Jan; Nunamaker Jr, Jay F; Sprague Jr, Ralph H (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2005)
Robert O. Briggs is a Research Coordinator at the Center for the Management of Information at the University of Arizona, and Associate Professor of Collaboration Engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He is also Director of Research and Development for GroupSystems.com. As a researcher, he has published more than 60 scholarly works on the theoretical foundations of collaboration, and he applies his findings to the development and deployment of collaborative technology to enhance team productivity, team creativity, and team satisfaction. His work on organizational transition to collaborative technology led to new insights about how to conceive of and deploy group support systems so as to create self-sustaining and growing communities of users. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1994. Gert-Jan de Vreede is a Professor at the Department of Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he is director of the Peter Kiewit Institute’s Program on E-Collaboration. He is also affiliated with the Faculty of Technology, Policy, and Management of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where he received his Ph.D. His research focuses on the application, adoption, and diffusion of collaboration technology in organizations, the development of repeatable collaborative processes, facilitation of group meetings, and the application of collaboration technology in different sociocultural environments. His articles have appeared in various journals, including Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Decision Systems, Communications of the ACM, Journal of Creativity and Innovation Management, DataBase, Group Decision and Negotiation, Simulation, and Journal of Simulation Practice and Theory. Jay F. Nunamaker Jr. is Regents and Soldwedel Professor of MIS, Computer Science and Communication, and Director of the Center for the Management of Information at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Dr. Nunamaker received the LEO Award from the Association of Information Systems at ICIS in Barcelona, Spain, December 2002. This award is given for a lifetime of exceptional achievement in information systems. He was elected as a fellow of the Association of Information Systems in 2000. Dr. Nunamaker has over 40 years of experience in examining, analyzing, designing, testing, evaluating, and developing information systems. He has served as a test engineer at the Shippingport Atomic Power facility, as a member of the ISDOS team at the University of Michigan, and as a member of the faculty at Purdue University, prior to joining the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1974. His research on group support systems addresses behavioral as well as engineering issues and focuses on theory as well as implementation. Dr. Nunamaker received his Ph.D. in systems engineering and operations research from Case Institute of Technology, an M.S. and B.S. in engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, and a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University. He has been a licensed professional engineer since 1965. Ralph H. Sprague Jr. is a Professor and Chairman of the Department of Information Technology in the College of Business at the University of Hawaii. He has over 30 years of experience in teaching, research, and consulting in the use of computer and information technologies in organizations. His specialties are decision support systems, strategic systems planning, the management of information systems, and electronic document management. He has served as chairman or cochairman of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences for the past 25 years. What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients . . . Human attention is the scarcest resource. —Herbert A. Simon, economist, Nobel Prize winner The digital age has given us access to a wealth of information. With those riches come at least two critical questions: (1) How do we assure the permanence of our valuable digital archives? and (2) How can users sift the information they need from the vast ocean of information available to them? This special issue on context-driven information access and deployment takes on both of those questions. Each of the papers in this issue was nominated for a best-paper award in the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. The first paper in this issue addresses the question of permanence. Alan R. Heminger and Don M. Kelley address concerns about the permanent loss of valuable data stored in digital archives when the means and methods used to retrieve the bitstream become obsolete. In their paper, “Assessing the Digital Rosetta Stone Model for Long-Term Access to Digital Documents,” the authors report the results of a Delphi assessment among subject-matter experts of the Digital Rosetta Stone, a conceptual model for capturing and maintaining the methods necessary to retrieve digital information stored on obsolete media and to properly interpret it after the software used to create it may also be obsolete. The paper reveals limitations and concerns about the model, and calls us to action with respect to this critically important topic. The next two papers offer novel approaches to improving information access on the World Wide Web. Weiguo Fan, Michael D. Gordon, and Praveen Pathak offer a new approach to using genetic algorithms to rank order the results of a Web search in their paper, “Genetic Programming-Based Discovery of Ranking Functions for Effective Web Search.” The approach exploits both structure and content information from the Web. Their research suggests that the new algorithm outperformed several other well-known ranking algorithms. In their paper, “A Visual Framework for Knowledge Discovery on the Web: An Empirical Study of Business Intelligence Exploration,” Wingyan Chung, Hsinchun Chen, and Jay F. Nunamaker Jr. propose two new algorithms for reducing information overload among people seeking information on the Web. They report the results of empirical experiments that compare the new algorithms with conventional Web search mechanisms, and demonstrate the relative merits of each approach. The final three papers in this issue address issues of information access and deployment within specific information-intensive domains. Two of them seek to improve the lot of cancer patients. The paper, “Data Mining with Combined Use of Optimization Techniques and Self-Organizing Maps for Improving Risk Grouping Rules: Application to Prostate Cancer Patients,” by Leonid Churilov, Adyl Bagirov, Daniel Schwartz, Kate Smith, and Michael Dally, reports on a new approach that improves on previous methods for assigning prostate cancer patients to homogenous groups to support clinical treatment decisions. The correct classification of risk informs choices about whether or not to apply invasive therapies, which often bring multiple serious side effects. The improvement in risk classification afforded by this new approach may have a direct effect on the length and quality of life for cancer patients. Jan Marco Leimeister, Winfried Ebner, and Helmut Krcmar report on field studies to analyze the information and interaction needs of cancer patients, and then describe the creation of a pilot mobile virtual community for cancer patients in Germany in their paper, “Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Trust-Supporting Components in Virtual Communities for Patients.” The paper highlights the unique requirements of health-related virtual community systems, with a particular focus on aspects relating to trust that may not be as important in other kinds of virtual communities. The paper discusses social, technical, and economic factors required to create a stable, highly involving virtual community. The paper, “Negotiation in Technology Landscapes: An Actor-Issue Analysis,” by Samuel Bendahan, Giovanni Camponovo, Jean-Sébastien Monzani, and Yves Pigneur propose a new model for supporting stakeholders in large-scale negotiations in environments of high complexity and uncertainty, and then detail a new system based on that model. The system includes new visualization tools for analyzing negotiation outcomes, representing negotiation landscapes, and applying what-if simulations using passive influence, expected outcome and dissatisfaction, power distribution, proximity, and negotiation maps. The model and its associated tools are illustrated in the application of assessing a public WLAN market. Each of these papers makes a unique contribution to knowledge in the area of information access and deployment. We commend them to your readings.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1989)

Special Section: Measuring Business Value of Information Technology in E-Business Environments - Mahmood, M Adam; Kohli, Rajiv; Devaraj, Sarv (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2004)
M. Adam Mahmood is a Professor of Computer Information Systems in the Department of Information and Decision Sciences at the University of Texas at El Paso. He also holds the Ellis and Susan Mayfield Professorship in the College of Business Administration. He was a visiting faculty at the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration in Finland and a visiting Erskine Scholar at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems at Texas Tech University. Dr. Mahmood’s research interest centers on economics of information systems, electronic commerce, strategic and competitive information systems, group decision support systems, and organizational and end-user computing. On this topic and others, he has published over 85 technical research papers in some of the leading journals and conference proceedings, including the Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Decision Sciences, European Journal of Information Systems, INFOR—Canadian Journal of Operation Research and Information Processing, Information and Management, Journal of Organizational and End User Computing, Data Base, and others. He has also presented papers in a number of regional, national, and international conferences. Dr. Mahmood presently serves as the editor of the Journal of Organizational and End User Computing. As a Governor’s appointee, he also serves as a member of the Texas Department of Information Resources Board of Directors. He has served as a guest editor of the Journal of Management Information Systems and the International Journal of Electronic Commerce. He has also served as president of the Information Resources Management Association. Rajiv Kohli is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Notre Dame. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County campus. He has consulted with IBM Global Services, SAS Corporation, UPS, MCI Telecommunications, among others, including several health-care organizations. Prior to joining academia in 2001, he worked for Trinity Health, where he led the strategic planning for e-business initiatives. Dr. Kohli’s research has been published in Management Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, Information Systems Research, Communications of the ACM, and Decision Support Systems, among other journals. He is a coauthor of the book IT Payoff: Measuring Business Value of Information Technology Investment (Financial Times Prentice Hall). Sarv Devaraj is an Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He has consulted with several companies, including Honeywell, Trinity Health, and Infosys Technologies. His research areas include information technology payoff, technology acceptance, electronic commerce, service quality, and productivity management. His research has been published in Management Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, Information Systems Research, Decision Support Systems, Decision Sciences, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions, Journal of Operations Management, and other journals. He is the coauthor of a book recently published by Prentice Hall/Financial Times on IT payoff. His research work has won “Best Paper” awards at several international conferences. E-commerce, or the use of the Internet and the Web to conduct business, is typically categorized into business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and intraorganizational e-business. Businesses, governments, and nonprofit organizations are increasingly investing in information technology (IT) infrastructures to be able to conduct digitally enabled transactions. Online shoppers, constituting the B2C segment, spent a record $18.5 billion during the 2003 holiday season, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, representing a 35 percent increase from 2002 [6]. All indications are that e-commerce will continue to grow in the coming years. While we have witnessed promising growth in the B2C area, there is a tremendous opportunity for generating business value from B2B e-commerce. Moreover, a few traditional businesses, such as Barnes & Noble, Dell, and Wal-Mart, have been successful in integrating e-commerce into their traditional bricks-and-mortar business models. However, many other companies still struggle with implementing and justifying e-commerce initiatives [2]. Managers primarily worry about falling behind in the implementation of e-commerce initiatives, yet the business value of these initiatives needs justification. The evidence on both the success and failure of such initiatives has been generally anecdotal. This calls for rigorous empirical research examining the payoff realized from e-commerce initiatives. There is a rich body of literature on the business value of IT investment in traditional bricks-and-mortar business environments [1, 2, 4, 11]. However, these studies have been conducted in different contexts, at various levels of analysis, and have examined various metrics of business value [3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12]. Although the insights provided by this body of work in the context of the traditional business environment have been invaluable, they fall far short of furnishing an adequate answer to the question of whether an IT investment generates business value in the new Net-enabled business environment. This is especially complicated by the fact that the Net-enabled environment, which harnesses the power of the Internet and Web-based technologies, challenges some of the traditional frameworks, models, and metrics. Thus, there is a need to examine theories, frameworks, and metrics in the e-business environment. Even as businesses hasten to make their operations e-business enabled, the fundamental question that is often unanswered is—how does this initiative provide business value? The four research papers included in this JMIS Special Section represent contributions from some of the prominent researchers in the business value of e-commerce area. These papers were selected from a large number of submissions following a rigorous review process by expert reviewers in the discipline. They reflect an important milestone in the examination of e-business value. Leading off this Special Section is a paper by Zhu, Kraemer, Xu, and Dedrick. The authors, drawing on a technology–organization–environment framework, present a research model for assessing the business value of e-business initiatives at the firm level. Using survey data from 612 companies in the financial industry across 10 countries, the authors test a number of hypotheses. Their results provide us with a number of interesting findings. First, technology readiness is the strongest factor that contributes to e-business value, while financial resources, global scope, and regulatory environment also contribute significantly. Second, firm size is negatively related to e-business value. Third, e-business value is associated more with internal organizational resources such as technological readiness as opposed to competitive pressure from outside. Fourth, for launching an e-business, financial resources and government regulations are more important in developing countries, while technological capabilities are much more important in developed countries. The authors provide thoughtful recommendations for managers and policy-makers to help them launch and manage an e-business. Dehning, Richardson, Urbaczewski, and Wells use an event study method to reexamine the value relevance of e-commerce announcements. They find evidence to support the notion that the traditional event study method, during periods of high market volatility, does not provide an accurate measure of abnormal returns. They propose an alternative method that takes into account extreme or unusual market movements in the period in which the e-commerce announcement is made. They show that their alternative method allows them to more accurately measure the change in a leading indicator (e.g., equity price) that is directly related to an individual event (e.g., e-commerce announcement). The authors claim that their technique gives researchers and investors a better tool for measuring e-business value during conditions of high industry and market volatility. Straub, Rai, and Klein argue that since, in recent years, the economy seems to be shifting to a networked organizational model, and firms are increasingly outsourcing functions and services and partnering with suppliers and intermediaries, it is critical to measure the performance of entire networks of firms, as opposed to measuring the performance of just individual firms. The authors then explore several dimensions of networked organizational performance as a construct within a nomology and as a set of measures. They offer numbered, tiered, and layered perspectives to networked interorganizational exchanges in a digital supply network. They validate measures for a dyadic view of network performance. Their present research in this area offers a way to gather crucial information about how partners work together in sharing strategic information and about how performance across an entire network can be measured and thereby improved. Kohli, Devaraj, and Mahmood examine the impact of Simon’s decision-making stages on consumers’ decision-making in B2C online shopping using 134 online consumers. The online channel providers continue to explore innovative ways to anticipate consumers’ need for an efficient shopping experience. By extending Simon’s decision-making model to include cost savings, time savings, and consumers’ satisfaction with the online channel, the authors examine support for the revised model. They use a structural equation modeling approach to analyze their data. Their results indicate that the online shopping channel supported the overall decision-making process of B2C consumers. In particular, the authors found strong support for the design and choice phases of online consumers’ decision-making process. The results also indicate that the support for the decision-making process was mediated by the cost savings and time savings gained by the online consumers and led to the greater satisfaction of the online channel. Collectively, the four papers included in this Special Section exemplify the challenges in the e-business environment and the application of new frameworks, metrics, and methods needed to address these in the contexts examined. Two of these studies examine the business value of e-business initiatives at the firm level. One examines the financial services industry (Zhu, Kraemer, Xu, and Dedrick) and the other reexamines the value relevance of e-commerce announcements using an alternative event study methodology (Dehning, Richardson, Urbaczewski, and Wells). While Straub, Rai, and Klein present metrics and analyses that can be employed to assess performance and value in digital supply networks, Kohli, Devaraj, and Mahmood show that value, from the online consumer’s perspective, can be examined using an established decision-making model. In summary, these four papers present diverse perspectives on the business value of IT in e-business environments while providing valuable managerial implications. The Special Issue of the International Journal of Electronic Commerce, to appear as the fall 2004 issue, will be a continuation of this Special Section. Collectively, these investigations will help spur further research in the area. Acknowledgments: We wish to recognize the contributions of the reviewers and associate editors to the JMIS Special Section and IJEC Special Issue for diligently reviewing and critiquing the submitted manuscripts, sometimes several versions of the same manuscripts. Their professionalism in moving this project to completion in a timely manner is truly appreciated. Our sincere thanks also goes to the authors for being highly responsive to the review team’s comments and promptly meeting the deadlines imposed on them. They made outstanding contributions to these publications. All manuscripts were reviewed by at least three reviewers, an associate editor, and at least one guest editor. Each accepted manuscript went though at least two revisions. The reviewers, associate editors, and guest editors diligently evaluated the original manuscript and its subsequent revisions until the manuscript was finally accepted or rejected. For those manuscripts in which one or more guest editor was an author, a guest associate editor was appointed to independently manage the review process and make the final decision. The guest associate editor selected at least three reviewers and followed the same process as for the other manuscripts. We express our special thanks to Hettie Houghton at the Information and Decision Sciences Department at the University of Texas at El Paso, who was instrumental in keeping the Special Issues project on track. Her effort and dedication to the project are truly appreciated. The associate editors for the JMIS Special Section and IJEC Special Issue were: Tim Ford, University of Texas at El Paso Guisseppi Forgionne, University of Maryland Baltimore County Robert Josefek, University of Southern California Albert Lederer, University of Kentucky Sophie Lee, California State University, Long Beach Moez Limayem, City University of Hong Kong Roger McHaney, Kansas State University Lance Revenaugh, Cedarville University Nilesh Saraf, Florida Atlantic University Thomas Stafford, University of Memphis Andrew Urbaczewski, University of Michigan–Dearborn The reviewers for the JMIS Special Section and IJEC Special Issue were: Vijay Agarwal, University of Nebraska at Kearney Michel Benaroch, Syracuse University Janice Burn, Edith Cowan University Terry Byrd, Auburn University Jeongil Choi, University of Nebraska at Lincoln Steve Clarke, University of Hull Melinda Cline, University of North Texas William DeLone, American University Amitava Dutta, George Mason University Timothy C. Ford, University of Texas at El Paso Guisseppi Forgionne, University of Maryland Baltimore County Matthew Guah, Brunel University Tor Guimaraes, Tennessee Technological University Laura Hall, University of Texas at El Paso Sandra Cherie Henderson, University of Texas at Arlington Albert H. Huang, University of the Pacific Wayne Huang, Ohio University Jim Jawahar, Illinois State University Robert Josefek, University of Southern California Andrew Kakabadse, Cranfield School of Management Chang Koh, University of North Texas Jennifer Kreie, New Mexico State University Stephen Kudyba, New Jersey Institute of Technology Management Louis A. Le Blanc, Berry College Albert Lederer, University of Kentucky Sophie Lee, California State University at Long Beach Choon Seong Leem, Yonsei University Thomas Marshall, Auburn University Roger McHaney, Kansas State University James D. McKeen, Queen’s University Nirup M. Menon, University of Texas at Dallas Jo Ellen Moore, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Jennifer Oetzel, American University David Paper, Utah State University Anne Powell, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Srinivasan Raghunathan, University of Texas at Dallas Arun Rai, Georgia State University Chandrasekaran Ranganthan, University of Illinois at Chicago Lance Revenaugh, Cedarville University Nilesh Saraf, Florida Atlantic University Judy Scott, University of Colorado at Denver Susan Sherer, Lehigh University Wesley Shu, San Diego State University Mikko Siponen, University of Oulu Charles Snyder, Auburn University References 1. Bailey, J.P., and Bakos, Y. An exploratory study of the emerging role of electronic intermediaries. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 1, 3 (Spring 1997), 7–20. 2. Barua, A.; Whinston, A.B.; and Yin, F. Value and productivity in the Internet economy. IEEE Computer, 33, 5 (2000), 102–105. 3. Brynjolfsson, E. The contribution of information technology to consumer welfare. Information Systems Research, 7, 3 (1996), 281–300. 4. Brynjolfsson, E., and Hitt, L.M. Beyond the productivity paradox. Communications of the ACM, 41, 8 (1998), 49–55. 5. Devaraj, S., and Kohli, R. Information technology payoff in the health-care industry: A longitudinal study. Journal of Management Information Systems, 16, 4 (Spring 2000), 41–67. 6. Goldman Sachs, Harris and Nielsen/NetRatings eSpending Report. New York, December 2003 (available at www.nielsen-netratings.com/). 7. Hitt, L.M., and Brynjolfsson, E. Beyond computation: Information technology, organizational transformation and business performance. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14, 4 (2000), 23–48. 8. Hu, Q., and Plant, R. An empirical study of the casual relationship between IT investment and firm performance.Information Resources Management Journal, 14, 3 (2001), 15–26. 9. Im, K.S.; Dow, K.E., and Grover, V. A reexamination of IT investment and the market value of the firm—An event study methodology. Information Systems Research, 12, 1 (2001), 103–117. 10. Mahmood, M.A., and Mann, G.J. Measuring the organizational impact of information technology investment: An exploratory study. Journal of Management Information Systems, 10, 1 (Summer 1993), 97–122. 11. Mahmood, M.A., and Mann, G.J. Impacts of information technology investment on organizational performance. Journal of Management Information Systems, 16, 4 (Spring 2000), 4–8. 12. Sichel D.E. Computers and aggregate economic growth: An update. Business Economics, 34, 2 (1999), 18–24.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2017)
The three studies that open this issue and volume of the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS) investigate the social aspects of information technology (IT) use. The first article focuses on the online health-care communities, which have become an irreplaceable component of cure and well-being. The participants of these communities disclose more information to the community more often than they reveal to medical practitioners; community members gain comfort, and sometimes learn more steadily than in a formal encounter with physicians and other health-care providers. In toto, the knowledge accumulated through the articulations on these community sites is an important complement to codified medical knowledge. Looked at through the lens of consumer cocreation of value, the user-generated content can be aggregated and deployed as an economic resource. This has been recognized by the pharmaceutical companies and other health-care suppliers. Here, Lu (Lucy) Yan and Yong Tan study the role of social influence enacted in these health-care communities on the perceptions of participants about the effectiveness of their treatment. They find that this influence is exerted to a significant degree, and they present nuanced findings about the role of moderating factors. These results need to be recognized by all the stakeholders. No doubt, these findings will be generalized to other electronic community settings. The success of online communities and social network sites (SNS) where communities most frequently act depends on user participation and, in particular, on the active engagement of participants in generating the content. Two author teams investigate empirically the antecedents of such behavior. The authors of the first of the works study contributory behavior: Jungwon Kuem, Soumya Ray, Mikko Siponen, and Sung S. Kim present and test a comprehensive model of this prosocial behavior on SNS. The researchers base their work on the theories of postadoption behavior and commitment to identify three mechanisms that regulate the engagement behavior of SNS users. The results, tested in the context of Facebook data, are of foundational value to further research and of practical use to SNS providers and community organizers. In the next work, Zhao Pan, Yaobin Lu, Bin Wang, and Patrick Y.K. Chau focus on social self-identity as a motivator in the general use of social media. Grounding themselves in identity theories, the authors dichotomize self-identity into the relational and social levels, and the use of social media into varied (variety-seeking) and reinforced (i.e., reinforcing a prior pattern). The authors find differential effects of social self-identity levels on this use. Again, useful implications follow. IT adoption is not a one-way street. Disadoption can, and often does, follow—and readoption of a new generation of a technology can emerge. Why would it? This is the research question pursued by Xin Xu, James Y.L. Thong, and Kar Yan Tam. These authors present a technology readoption model that includes two driver sets: the characteristics of prior experience with the technology and the drivers related to the new generation of technology. The model proves robust in testing, and the findings will serve further research in this promising domain, as well as help firms to win back those who have given up on the previous models of their IT artifacts. As we all know, cyberloafing is a common behavior that involves using the Internet on the job for private ends. It is deleterious in its effects beyond the misuse of the employee’s time, in that security risks can result, illegalities can open the employer to lawsuits, and morale can be lowered. Companies employ countermeasures. How effective are they? Here, Lara Khansa, Jungwon Kuem, Mikko Siponen, and Sung S. Kim empirically investigate the effectiveness of the announcement of formal organizational controls against these behaviors. These include policies and rules enforced by monitoring, and penalties for their violation. The authors propose a theoretically grounded model, which they test with pre- and postannouncement organizational surveys. The researchers find that the antecedents of cyberloafing change in the postannouncement stage. The change is significant, as discussed by the authors extensively, and its recognition will serve to control cyberloafing. The findings will also help control other deviant behavior when specialized to other settings. Two subsequent papers present a formal analysis of IT phenomena. Shengli Li, Hsing Kenneth Cheng, Yang Duan, and Yu-Chen Yang offer a comparative study of the advantages of alternative licensing models for enterprise software. Such systems can be acquired in the contemporary setting in three ways: by purchase and installation in the data center itself (on-premises model), by use from the cloud on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, or by combining the two in a hybrid approach. What is the optimal choice from the perspective of the software vendor? Based on their analysis in the context of the common two-period deployment of enterprise software (the original version and one upgrade), the authors offer conclusive recommendations. Notably, network effects play a significant role in disposition. Expert services are increasingly offered online. Medical, legal, and accounting services are just the most obvious examples. Obviously, physical service delivery still prevails. What should be the pricing structure in such multichannel delivery systems for expert services? M. Tolga Akçura and Zafer D. Ozdemir present a game-theoretic model that allows them to offer well-founded advice to experts and a foundation for analysts of social welfare to conduct further work in this area, which will soon include robo-providers of expert services. The role of IT integration in mergers and acquisitions of firms is large enough to lead at times to the withdrawal of offers or even failures of such corporate moves. Here, a related, but different issue is studied with econometric analysis. Young Bong Chang and Wooje Cho investigate postmerger risks in their dependence on the motives for the merger or acquisition. The researchers also bring into their model the postmerger dynamics (read: potential instability) of the industry. The multifaceted analysis shows that the motives for this move by the acquirer, which may be production-side (internal activities of the firm) or customer-side (oriented toward capturing and serving the customers), entail different postmerger risks. In a more granular analysis, the authors offer guidelines for controlling these risks. The use of game elements in nongame contexts to engage IT users, known as gamification, has moved into the workplace. While appearing attractive in more senses than one, this approach has not been an unmitigated success: such systems are frequently abandoned. Ayoung Suh, Christy M.K. Cheung, Manju Ahuja, and Christian Wagner posit that the aesthetic experience (AE) provides to users should successfully complement the previously recognized flow experience (FE) in seeking the lasting use of gamified systems. The authors proceed to define and operationalize the AE construct. By validating their model in the setting of a consulting company, the researchers show that their proposed AE has a greater effect than FE on the intention to continue the use of a gamified IT artifact. This is an interesting contribution that can be expanded to other settings. As we open the thirty-fourth volume of JMIS, it is my pleasure and privilege to offer thanks to our referees, the primary guarantors of the quality of the articles we publish. Here are the names of our reviewers: Marc Adam Ashish Agarwal Hyung Jun Ahn Oliver Alexy Muhammad Aljukhadar Gove Allen Paul Alpar Niek Althuizen Kemal Altinkemer Naveen Amblee Ofer Arazy Ravi Aron Kursad Asdemir Norman Au Yoris Au Benoit A. Aubert Peter van Baalen Hyunmi Baek Akhilesh Bajaj Hillol Bala Dirk Baldwin Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay Youngsok Bang Gaurav Bansal Reza Barkhi Henri Barki Stuart J. Barnes Richard Baskerville Genevieve Basselier Dinesh Batra Daniel Beimborn D. France Belanger Skip Benamati Michel Benaroch Alexander Benlian François Bergeron Ganesh Bhatt Sudip Bhattacharjee David Biros Ivo Blohm Jesse Bockstedt Riccardo Bonazzi Antal van den Bosch Indranil Bose Imed Boughzala Randy Bradley Tobias Brandt Nicola Breugst Glenn J. Browne Sebastian Bruque Scott Buffett Burcu Bulgurcu Judee Burgoon Andrew Burton-Jones Ashley Bush Brian Butler Terry A. Byrd Sonia M. Camacho Jinwei Cao Lan Cao Hasan Cavusoglu Hsin-Lu Chang Young Bong Chang Mohamed-Hédi Charki Sutirtha Chatterjee Michael Chau Patrick Chau Aihui Chen Andrew Chen Daniel Chen Guoqing Chen Hong-Mei Chen Hsinchun Chen Jianqing Chen Jin Chen Kay-Yut Chen Kuan Chen Li Chen Liwei Chen Rui Chen Hsing Kenneth Cheng Mike Cheung Robert T.H. Chi Robert Chiang Roger Chiang Benjamin Chiao Ananth Chiravuri Alina M. Chircu Chaochang Chiu Jong-min Choe Ben Choi H. Michael Chung Wingyan Chung Theodore H. Clark Isabelle Comyn-Wattiau Randolph Cooper Kevin Crowston Dianne Cyr Qizhi Dai John D’Arcy Ronald Dattero Gregory Dawson Jason Dedrick Chrysanthos Dellarocas Haluk Demirkan Tianjie Deng Xuefei Deng Sarv Devaraj Debabrata Dey Jens Dibbern Soussan Djamasbi Su Dong Line Dubé Peter Duchessi Alina Dulipovici Deborah E. Dunkle Kaushik Dutta Robert Easley Dana Edberg Christophe Elie-Dit-Cosaque Omar A. El Sawy Mike Eom Sean B. Eom J. Alberto Espinosa Andrea Everard Kelly Fadel Ming Fan Patrick Fan Xiaofen Fang Yu-Hui Fang Yulin Fang Rei Fen Jane Feng Daniel R. Fesenmaier Thomas A. Fischer Jerry Fjermestad Chris Forman Chiara Francalanci Johann Füller Brent Furneaux John Gallaugher Dale Ganley Gordon Gao Hong Gao Monica Garfield Rajiv Garg Ina Garnefeld Edward J. Garrity Michiel van Genuchten Abhijeet Ghoshal Janis L. Gogan Kim Huat Goh Thomas Goh Sigi Goode Dale Goodhue Anand Gopal Ram D. Gopal Nelson Granados Peter Gray Dawn G. Gregg Shirley Gregor Ulrike Gretzel Robert K. Griffin Michael D. Grigoriades Bin Gu Ken Guo Xunhua Guo Zhiling Guo Saurabh Gupta Nicole Haggerty Jungpil Hahn Ingoo Han Kunsoo Han Shu Han Il-Horn Hann Matthew Hashim Cheng-Suang Heng Raymond Henry Hemantha Herath Tejaswini Herath Traci Hess Alan R. Hevner Oliver Hinz Susanna Ho Christian P. Hoffmann Richard Hoffman Jason Hong Kevin Hong Weiyin Hong John A. Hoxmeier Jeffrey Hu Nan Hu Paul Hu Petra Hu Qing Hu Chun-Yao Huang Ming-Hui Huang Shiu-Li Huang Wayne Huang Xiaowen Huang Thomas Huber Kai Lung Hui Wendy Hui Ard Huizing Ghiyong Im Gretchen I. Irwin Anja Ischebeck Varghese Jacob Bharat A. Jain Hemant Jain Jeevan Jaisingh Dietmar Jannach Matthew Jensen James J. Jiang Qiqi Jiang Zhengrui Jiang Zhenhui Jiang Monica Johar Alice Johnson Eric Johnson Emmanuel Josserand Surinder Kahai Arnold Kamis Atreyi Kankanhalli Karthik Kannan P.K. Kannan Maurits Kaptein Prasanna Karhade Jahangir Karimi Michael Kattan Timothy Kayworth Weiling Ke Mark Keith Peter Kenning William J. Kettinger Lara Khansa Moutaz Khouja Melody Y. Kiang Byung Cho Kim Dan J. Kim Dongmin Kim Hee-Woong Kim Keongtae Kim Kihoon Kim Seung Hyun Kim Young-Gul Kim Ruth King Rajiv Kishore Gary Klein Richard Klein Sven Kleinknecht Stefan Knoll Cenk Kocas Chang Koh Rajiv Kohli Tobias Kollman Praveen K. Kopalle Marios Koufaris Kenneth A. Kozar Ramayya Krishnan Uday Kulkarni Akhil Kumar Ram Kumar Subodha Kumar Jason Kuruzovich Juhee Kwon Atanu Lahiri Simon S.K. Lam Guido Lang Karl R. Lang Kai R. Larsen Benjiang Lee ByungJoon Lee Byungtae Lee Dong-Joo Lee Goonwoong Lee Gwanhoo Lee Heeseok Lee Ho Geun Lee Jong Seok Lee Jungwoo Lee Thomas Lee Yang Lee Youngjin Lee Pierre-Majorique Léger Jan Marco Leimeister Natalia Levina Chen Li Dahui Li Jiexun Li Mengxiang Li Seth Li Ting Li Xiaotong Li Xin Li XinXin Li Yan Li Huigang Liang Ting-Peng Liang Paul Licker John Lim Shi Ying Lim Aleck Lin Fu-ren Lin Mei Lin Zhijie Lin Charles Zhechao Liu Jun Liu Ying Liu Yipeng Liu Alexandre Lopes Paul B. Lowry Benjiang Lu Jingdu Lu Henry C. Lucas Jr. Stephan Ludwig Xueming Luo Christoph Lutz Mark Lycett Dan Ma Xiao Ma Jane M. Mackay Massimo Magni Pruthikrai Mahatanankoon M. Adam Mahmood Bin Mai Yogesh Malhotra Deepa Mani Ravi Mantena Salvatore T. March Kent Marett Panos Markopoulos Likoebe M. Maruping Sabine Matook Kurt Matzler Jerrold H. May Kristina McElheran Ephraim R. McLean Nigel Melville Nirup Menon Thomas Meservy Randy Minas Shaila Miranda Dinesh Mirchandani Abhay Nath Mishra Stephanie Missonier Sunil Mithas Prasenjit Mitra Kannan Mohan Peter N.C. Mohr William Money Ali R. Montazemi Ramiro Montealegre Alan Montgomery Greg Moody Jolene Morrison Michael D. Myers Peter P. Mykytyn Jr. Barin N. Nag Fiona Nah Ravi Narayanaswamy Derek Nazareth Matthew Nelson R. Ryan Nelson Boon Siong Neo Derrick Neufeld Dirk Neumann Dorit Nevo Saggi Nevo Michael Newman Tingting Nian Mark Nissen Dmitri Nizovtsev Oded Nov Joo Hee Oh Lih-Bin Oh Onook Oh Wonseok Oh Bob O’Keefe Lorne Olfman James Oliver Ana Ortiz de Guinea Benoit Otjacques Bob Otondo Peter Otto Eric Overby Zafer D. Ozdemir Raymond R. Panko Gautam Pant Manoj Parameswaran Michael Parent Insu Park SungJune Park Craig Parker Bhavik K. Pathak Praveen Pathak Ravi Patnayakuni Souren Paul David J. Pauleen Kenneth Peffers Robin Pennington Christoph Peters Chee-Wei Phang Roger A. Pick Selwyn Piramuthu Huseyin Polat Jean-Charles Pomerol Jaana Porra Constance Porter Clay Posey John H. Prager David Preston Sandeep Purao Jessica Pye Liangfei Qiu Lingyun Qiu Wen Guang Qu Xin Xue Qu Arik Ragowsky Rex Kelly Rainer Jr. Balaraman Rajan Vandana Ramachandran Arkalgud Ramaprasad Bala Ramesh H.R. Rao R. Ravichandran Gautam Ray Louis Raymond Blaize Horner Reich Bruce Reinig Fei Ren Yuqing Ren Paul Resnick Hyuen-Suk Rhee Amir Riaz William B. Richmond Christoph Riedl René Riedl Lionel Robert Nicholas Roberts Daniel Robey Michael Rogich Huaxia Rui Sherry D. Ryan Young U. Ryu Michael Sacks Khawaja Saeed Rajib Saha Otavio Sanchez G. Lawrence Sanders Radhika Santhanam Pallab Sanyal Saonee Sarker Surendra Sarnikar Carol Saunders Kevin Scheibe George Schell Hans J. Scholl Petra Schubert Judy Scott Eric See-To Ravi Sen Sagnika Sen Sylvain Sénécal Alexander Serenko Nainika Seth Vikram Sethi Theresa M. Shaft Zhe Shan Tushar Shanker Michael Shaw Jim Sheffield Hong Sheng Zhan Shi Hung-Pin Shih Siew Kien Sia Keng Siau Anna Sidorova Mark Silver Harpreet Singh Param Vir Singh Atish P. Sinha Sumit Sircar Bernd Skiera Stefan Smolnik Jaeki Song Ryan Sougstad Scott Spangler William E. Spangler Rajendra P. Srivastava Shirish C. Srivastava Thomas F. Stafford Eric W. Stein Dick Stenmark Stefan Stieglitz Theofanis C. Stratopoulos Diane M. Strong Mani Subramani Chandra Subramaniam Ramanath Subramanyam Eung-Kyo Suh Daewon Sun Heshan Sun Arun Sundararajan Shankar Sundaresan Juliana SutantoPaul P. Tallon Chuan-Hoo Tan Yao-Hua Tan Xinlin Tang Mohan R. Tanniru Monideepa Tarafdar Nolan Taylor Orkun Temizkan Gary F. Templeton Hock Hai Teo Thompson Teo Matthew Thatcher Dominic Thomas Ron Thompson James Y.L. Thong Ryad Titah Torrie Wu Tong Monica Chiarini Tremblay Yanbin Tu Ofir Turel Tuure Tuunanen Doug Twitchell Nathan W. Twyman Sonja Utz Rustam Vahidov Ganesan Vaidyanathan Anthony Vance Goetz Viering Padmal Vitharana Radu Vlas Douglas Vogel Sebastian Voigt Jan vom Brocke Heinz-Theo Wagner Steven Walczak Eric Walden Jeffrey Wall Joseph Walls Zhiping Walter Bin Wang Eric T.G. Wang Jingguo Wang Michael S. Wang Qiu-Hong Wang Shouhong Wang Sophia Wang Weiquan Wang Yinglei Wang Y. Richard Wang Deepa Wani Sidne Ward Mary Beth Watson-Manheim Sunil Wattal Thomas Weber Chih-Ping Wei Markus Weinmann Tim Weitzel John Wells Robert West J. Christopher Westland Jonathan Whitaker Michael E. Whitman Jeffrey L. Whitten George Widmeyer Rolf Wigand Fons Wijnhoven E. Vance Wilson Robert Winter Christopher Wolfe Christina Wong Charles A. Wood Hans Wortmann Ryan Wright Dazhong Wu Choon Ling Xia Lan Xia Weidong Xia Mingdi Xin Heng Xu Hongjiang Xu Kefeng Xu Lizhen Xu Peng Xu Yunjie (Calvin) Xu Ling Xue Lucy Yan Yinping Yang Zhiyong Yang Oliver Yao Cheng Yi Denny Yin Zhitao Yin Byungjoon Yoo Yufei Yuan Wei T. Yue Fatemeh (Mariam) Zahedi Chun Zeng Dongsong Zhang Han Zhang Jennifer Zhang John Zhang Ping Zhang Xiaoquan Zhang Yulei Zhang Zhu Zhang Huimin Zhao J. Leon Zhao Kang Zhao Kexin Zhao Xia Zhao Dmitry Zhdanov Lina Zhou Yilu Zhou Zhongyun Zhou Hongwei Zhu Wenqi Zhu Youlong Zhuang Moshe Zviran Let us proceed to the articles.

Special Section: Engineering Artifacts and Processes of Information Systems - Giboney, Justin S; Briggs, Robert; Nunamaker, Jr., Jay (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
JUSTIN SCOTT GIBONEY (justin_giboney@byu.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Information Technology at Brigham Young University. He received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona. His research focuses on behavioral information security, deception detection, and knowledge-based systems. He has been an investigator on six NSF-funded grants on deception and forensics-related technologies. Dr. Giboney has published 29 papers related to information security, deception detection, and decision support in such journals as MIS Quarterly, Computers & Security, Decision Support Systems, and Computers in Human Behavior, and others. ROBERT O. BRIGGS (rbriggs@mail.sdsu.edu; corresponding author) is a Professor of Information Systems at San Diego State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Information Systems from University of Arizona. Dr. Briggs researches the cognitive foundations of collaboration and uses his findings to design and deploy new collaboration systems and new collaborative work practices. He is co-founder of Collaboration Engineering as a scholarly discipline, co-inventor of the thinkLets design pattern language, and the inventor of Computer Assisted Collaboration technology and Process Support Applications. Dr. Briggs has published more than 250 peer-reviewed manuscripts related to economic, social, political, cognitive, emotional, and technological aspects of collaboration. He lectures around the world on the logic of scientific inquiry. JAY F. NUNAMAKER JR (jnunamaker@cmi.arizona.edu) is Regents and Soldwedel Professor of MIS, Computer Science and Communication and Director of the Center for the Management of Information and the National Center for Border Security and Immigration at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in operations research and systems engineering from Case Institute of Technology. Dr. Nunamaker has held a professional engineer’s license since 1965. His specialization is in the fields of system analysis and design, collaboration technology, and deception detection. The commercial product Group Systems ThinkTank, based on his research, is often referred to as the gold standard for structured collaboration systems. He was inducted into the Design Science Hall of Fame and received the LEO Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Information Systems. Dr. Nunamaker was featured in the July 1997 issue of Forbes Magazine on technology as one of eight key innovators in information technology. He founded the MIS Department at the University of Arizona in 1974 and served as department head for 18 years. IntroductionInformation Systems (IS) is, and by definition must be, in part, an engineering research discipline. The unique purpose that defines IS as a discipline, and distinguishes us from our reference disciplines is:To understand and improve the ways people create value with information If we seek-to-improve, then it is inescapable that some part of our research community must design and test solutions, and so it does. IS researchers design hardware, software, and procedures for using the technology in ways that create value; they design data models, infrastructure, organizational structures, and operational standards. We are, in part, a design-driven engineering research discipline. Engineering research is different than engineering practice. Engineering practice creates a specific solution to a specific problem for specific people in a specific context, and the solution need not be novel, only useful. Engineering research, by contrast uses scientific knowledge and techniques to develop novel, generalizable solutions to major real-world issues, important classes of unsolved problems in the field. A generalizable solution must be adaptable to the many contexts in which a problem appears. The integrated circuit (IC) chip in one’s phone, for instance, is a product of engineering: a specific solution for a specific problem. The IC chip as a concept is a generalizable solution, one can adapt it to the many contexts where high speed digital logic could add value. Engineering research uses scientific methods to validate a generalizable solution, and then, builds a design theory, which is a body of knowledge that practitioners can use to create their own instances of the generalizable solution. Action Research, Design Science Research, and Action Design Science Research are instantiations of Engineering Research. The focus of this special issue is Engineering IS Artifacts and Practices. There are at least three objects-of-research at the heart of every engineering discipline: design artifacts, (e.g., diagrams, plans); designed artifacts (In our case, the information systems we create); and design processes (e.g., Joint Application Design; Rapid Prototyping). Each of the papers in this issue concerns one of more of these objects. The paper, “Nuanced Responses to Enterprise Architecture Management: Loyalty, Voice, and Exit,” by Lena Hylving and Bendik Bygstad concerns the engineering of IS governance processes at the organizational level. The paper investigates why a substantial portion of Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) initiatives fail to produce organizational change. EAM governance is centralized by necessity, but practical responses to a centralize plan emerge from social processes in departments and projects, where local optimization of utility may precipitate resistance to EAM initiatives. The authors investigate three field cases in a large government agency and discover how stakeholders at the project level respond to EAM initiatives and how to characterize observed differences. The study found responses ranging from active cooperation to disinterested disregard. The more successful implementations of EAM used innovation processes that fostered opportunities for mutual learning among EAM and project personnel. The paper recommends that “EAM should drop its obsession with compliance, and partner with stakeholders to learn from them instead of trying to control them.” The authors conclude that, for EAM to succeed, its leaders should embrace modern agile approaches to management based on iterative learning and frequent feedback. The work of Hao Hua Sun Yin, Klaus Langenheldt, Mikkel Harlev, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, and Ravi Vatrapu tests the utility of a designed object. The authors use a machine learning approach to deduce the identities of cryptocurrency accounts associated with criminal activity in their paper, “Regulating Cryptocurrencies: A Supervised Machine Learning Approach to De-Anonymizing the Bitcoin Blockchain.” This paper presents a novel approach for de-anonymizing the Bitcoin Blockchain by using Supervised Machine Learning to predict the type of yet-unidentified entities. Results revealed that the approach could indeed predict the type of a yet-unidentified entity. Authors achieved an average cross-validation accuracy of 80.42% in the test set. The authors conclude that the assumed level of anonymity of the Bitcoin Blockchain may not as high as commonly believed. In their paper, “Collaboration Engineering Research and Practice: Contributions, Insights, and Future Directions,” Gert-Jan de Vreede and Robert O. Briggs examine the current state of an emerging design discipline, presenting an exhaustive review and analysis of the Collaboration Engineering literature from its first scholarly paper in 2001 through the peer-reviewed articles of 2017. Collaboration Engineering (CE) is an approach to designing technology-supported collaborative work practices for high-value tasks and transferring them to practitioners to execute without support from collaboration experts. The paper summarizes the contributions of 331 papers from authors from 21 countries on all permanently settled continents except Australia. The paper organizes the scholarly contributions of CE under four themes: Foundations, Approach, Tools, and Professionalization, with a number of related topics in each theme. It then synthesizes key insights from the extant body of CE research. It identifies significant areas of inquiry that have not yet been explored and looks ahead to CE research opportunities that emerge as society, organizations, technologies, and the nature of collaboration evolve. The paper may be useful as a step toward compiling a validated canon of CE concepts into a design theory of Collaboration Engineering, as well as for shaping a research agenda for the coming decade. It may also offer a gateway for scholars with new interests in CE to gain familiarity with the literature. The studies in this issue build on some of the best work reported at the Hawaii International Conference on Information Systems. We commend them for your reading.

Special Section: Online Social Connections: Efficiency Versus Regulation - Clemons, Eric K; Dewan, Rajiv M; Kauffman, Robert J; Weber, Thomas A (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2015)
ERIC K. CLEMONS is a professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His education includes an S.B. in physics from MIT, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University. His research for the past 30 years has involved the systematic study of the transformational effects of information on the strategy and practice of business. He was among the first scholars to study online global securities trading, business process outsourcing, channel conflict and e-commerce, and the effect of information on product proliferation and the transformation of consumer behavior in these new marketplaces. More recently, he has begun studying privacy and the challenges of applying current antitrust law to online business models. He is the founder and project director for the Wharton School’s Sponsored Research Project on Information: Strategy and Economics within the Program for Global Strategy and Knowledge Intensive Organizations. He has also held appointments at the Harvard Business School, the Johnson School of Management at Cornell, the Engineering College at Cornell, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Peking University Law School, and the Desautels Centre at the Rotman School of the University of Toronto. He has published over 100 scholarly papers and regularly publishes online in Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Tech Crunch. RAJIV M. DEWAN is the Xerox Professor of Business and a professor of computers and information systems at the Simon Business School of the University of Rochester. His teaching and research interests include business analytics, organizational issues in management of information systems, the information technology industry, and financial information systems. He has won three Best Paper Awards for research, done in collaboration with colleagues at the Simon School, on the use of information systems standards in organizations, redesign of business processes, and management of websites. His papers have appeared in the Journal of Computing, Management Science, Decision Support Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Computers, among other journals. ROBERT J. KAUFFMAN is a professor of information systems at the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. He also serves as associate dean (research) and deputy director of the Living Analytics Research Centre. He holds an M.S. (systems science) and a Ph.D. (industrial administration) from the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, as well as an M.A. (East Asian studies) from Cornell University. Recently, he was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Center for Digital Strategies of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. His research focuses on technology and strategy, the economics of IT, technology in financial services and e-business, managerial decision making, and innovations in research methods. His work has appeared in Information Systems Research (ISR), Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Telecommunications Policy, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Management Science, Review of Economics and Statistics, Operations Research Letters, and elsewhere. His 2014 ISR paper was recently nominated as European Research Paper of the Year by CIONET Europe, a group of 4,600 chief information officers. THOMAS A. WEBER holds the Chair of Operations, Economics and Strategy at the Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Earlier he was a faculty member at Stanford University. He is an Ingénieur des Arts et Manufactures (Ecole Centrale Paris) and a Diplom-Ingenieur in Electrical Engineering (Technical University Aachen). He has Master’s degrees in technology and policy and electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a Ph.D. from the Wharton School. He was visiting faculty in economics at Cambridge University and in mathematics at Moscow State University. Between 1998 and 2002, he was a senior consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. His current research interests include the economics of information and uncertainty, the design of contracts, and strategy. His articles have appeared in American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Management Science, Economics Letters, Economic Theory, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Journal of Regulatory Economics, and other journals. He is the author of Optimal Control Theory with Applications in Economics (MIT Press, 2011). The rapid adoption of social networks in industrialized countries affects the organization of activities, the allocation of resources, and the way individuals interact with each other and with institutions. The results can be powerfully positive, such as in crowdsourcing, where a task that might be too expensive to carry out alone becomes suddenly feasible by distributing it to an online user base. They can also be more problematic, when companies use their newfound proximity to their users to extract larger rents: especially with the most unsuspecting of the online population, the young and vulnerable. The two papers in this Special Section explore the complex and contradictory effects of online connectivity by presenting advancing hypotheses and empirical observations about the good, the bad, and the ugly in online interactions. The authors also suggest paths for regulators to improve social welfare by requiring widespread access to a common information infrastructure. The first paper, “Task Division for Team Success in Crowdsourcing Contests: Resource Allocation and Alignment Effects,” by Indika Dissanayake, Jie Zhang, and Bin Gu, studies how the allocation of human capital on a crowdsourcing platform affects team performance. Based on a large data set from Kaggle.com, the work highlights the importance of different capabilities, here represented by “social capital” and “intellectual capital,” for different roles in a virtual team effort. In particular, the authors observe that team performance is positively related with the team leader’s social capital and with any team expert’s intellectual capital, while an increase of the other capability for the leader or an expert has no positive effect on team performance. The authors also argue that the aggregation of capabilities across the members of a team is non-uniform, in the sense that a simple average or direct sum of the values for the individuals is not the best indicator for team performance. This is because an individual’s role in the team moderates the impact of his or her capabilities. These observations are significant because the observed incentives in the data set are strong, with a median reward of about $8,000 (and an average reward of about $15,000) for more than 700 teams participating in Kaggle’s crowdsourcing competitions. Interestingly, with an increase of the competitiveness in a given task, as measured by a decrease of the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI), the importance of the social-intellectual alignment for team performance diminishes. Thus, when exposed to greater competitive pressure, teams with a similar level of capabilities do better both socially and intellectually. While this might seem intuitive, it is empirically surprising that the converse holds when competitive pressures are low, that is, teams with less well-aligned capabilities do better. This study is the first to focus on the effects of team members’ heterogeneity on the team’s performance in crowdsourcing tasks. The second paper, “Family Preferences Concerning Online Privacy, Data Mining, and Targeted Ads: Regulatory Implications,” by Eric K. Clemons and Joshua S. Wilson, analyzes international survey data about the online activities of teenagers as well as parental awareness and preferences about data-mining practices related to their children. The authors note that combining user-specific information from a variety of sources enables companies such as Google and organizations purchasing this type of data to estimate consumer preferences very well. They can now do this to a resolution that allows a high degree of price discrimination in order to extract greater rents overall, revealing each individual’s entire willingness to pay. The implications of data mining for privacy are worse because the adverse consequences are potentially longer-lived, especially with respect to vulnerable user groups. Using survey data from the United States, Germany, Japan, and several South American countries, the authors argue that there is a wide gap between the online behavior of teens and parental awareness, and preferences about privacy. By penetrating the institutional safety of schools, once-trusted companies are able to collect private data about unsuspecting users, which can only be the tip of the iceberg for the information aggregates, collected and sold as “big data” to third parties. The authors explore the real costs associated with targeted ads and data mining, and then lay the groundwork for a structured discussion about regulatory intervention, which so far has barely begun. A case in point is the recent intervention of the European Union into Google’s potential abuse of its market power by exploiting control over data aggregates to serve its own interest [1]. This paper is one of the first systematic empirical investigations to link potential corporate malpractice in extracting consumer data and public policy. Thus, it is a pioneering piece in opening up a new line of inquiry into regulatory intervention for the protection of privacy and the limitation of corporate data use. Broadly speaking, both papers tackle new types of incentives that matter because of online social connections. Individuals can form virtual teams and try to perform well together by assigning roles to different members. A higher degree of connectedness therefore results, all else equal, in more teams and thus a higher degree of competitiveness (measured in the HHI of “brain share” concentration), changing the returns to diversity in teams. On the other hand, corporations are embracing their users’ online presence by tracking behavior and finding ways to mine the data so as to improve predictive accuracy, with the goal of using this one-sided intimacy to their advantage. This is a form of collusion against consumers. Here one can also expect an excess return for those who perform best at extracting information rents. This is ultimately likely to reduce variety, and is a counterintuitive outcome for the diverse beginnings of social connections. Reference 1.Barker, A.; Oliver, C.; Chassany, A.-S. Europe to accuse Google of illegally abusing its dominance. Financial Times, April 15, 2015. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/643f49ec-e285-11e4-aa1d-00144feab7de.html#axzz3gZg8xBKJ (accessed July 21, 2015).

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2002)
INFORMATION-TECHNOLOGY (IT) INVESTMENTS are the subject of the first three papers in this issue. Debabroto Chatterjee, Carl Pacini, and V. Sambamurthy examine the effects of corporate announcements of investments in IT infrastructure on the valuation of the announcing companies by financial markets. The authors find strong evidence of a positive response by equities markets to such investment, much more so than to the announcements regarding investments in IT applications. The work offers significant evidence of the IT infrastructure being perceived by economic actors as a revenue generator. Indeed, investments in the IT infrastructure have been, for quite some time, analyzed as the bearers of options for future corporate growth. This perspective is taken up by Michel Benaroch, who moves this line of research forward by using this method to purposely embed the options that promise the highest reward-to-risk ratio in an IT investment. The approach allows to embed multiple options for future revenue streams. An entirely different, and complementary, aspect of IT investment decision-making is investigated by Sherry D. Ryan, David A. Harrison, and Lawrence L. Schkade. These researchers study empirically what role the consideration of the social subsystem plays in the corporate IT investment decisions. The authors conclude that corporations do tend to pay greater attention to the effects on social subsystems when major, potentially disruptive initiatives are undertaken. However, they also find significant myopic lacunae—and the insights gained there are of value. Taken together, the three papers offer an excellent and multifaceted sample of the contemporary thinking on IT investments. The set of papers is made even more compelling by its methodological richness, spanning the empirics based on event analysis, formal options–theoretic analysis, and empirical work based on the social systems theory. Theory and empirics combine to offer guidance for practice. The next paper in the issue is an introspective study that echoes this diversity. Iris Vessey, V. Ramesh, and Robert L. Glass define the notion of research diversity in the information systems (IS) discipline and study its leading journals from that perspective. The authors define and evolve the attributes they deploy to investigate IS research, which will help in the future work in the area. According to the present study, the Journal of Management Information Systems is, along with Information Systems Research, the most representative of the journals, as well as publishing papers displaying the greatest diversity. Indeed, since its foundation, JMIS has adopted a broad view of the field of IS and, consequently, of its publication domain. In this view, the discipline of management information systems (MIS) includes both the development and the use of the organizational and interorganizational information technologies. Multiple levels of analysis, varied research methods, systems deployed for the electronic hierarchies as well as for markets, are all implicit in this definition. It is not surprising under this definition of the field of MIS, that the authors of the present study find that the field of MIS has itself become a reference discipline. One of the burgeoning research areas where information systems play a fundamental role is organizational learning, which has been recognized as essential to performance in a knowledge economy. Much discussed and dissected, the construct is difficult to assess. Here, Gary F. Templeton, Bruce R. Lewis, and Charles A. Snyder present and validate an instrument for such assessment. As appropriate at this stage, the work is exploratory. It is expected to lead to more extensive validation and expansion, further relating the construct to organizational performance. Component reuse is an essential raison d’être of object-oriented software development. Clearly, the benefits of reuse could be expected to be greater, should it be targeted at the earlier stages of development. Better solutions and more efficient processes can be expected therefore at the analysis stage. Gretchen Irwin is investigating here these very claims—to arrive at disappointments. In the novice development environment she investigated, there were no quality benefits. Pursuing further the nature of similarity between the existing software artifact and the software under development, the author is able to discriminate among the attributes of the reuse process that could perhaps be enhanced by reuse with experience. This study has clear implications for practice and should lead to further work, particularly among experienced developers. Two studies center on the IS personnel. James J. Jiang and Gary Klein deploy discrepancy theory to the turnover of IS personnel, which continues to be expensive for the employers of experienced IT workers, even during the periods of relatively high unemployment. The model developed by the authors is, to put it simply, based on the gap between what the workers expect from an employer and what they actually get. The model works well and is important in shaping career plans in the IS domain. Mark E. McMurtrey, Varun Grover, James T.C. Teng, and Nancy J. Lightner study a closely related issue, that of job satisfaction, in the specific—yet broad—environment of CASE tool deployment. A combination of task restructuring to appropriately rely on the computer-aided development tool with the selection of the more technologically oriented personnel is the recommendation resulting from this work. Group support systems (GSS) have multiple and interrelated effects on the outcomes and the processes of electronically supported meetings. Process gains and losses result, contingent on the nature of collaboration technologies and the way they are deployed, under task and social structure invariance. Most studies deal with individual meetings. In a longitudinal study presented here, Bruce A. Reinig and Bongsik Shin concentrate on process losses and surface the factors that can limit them over time. Several approaches to limiting the losses or their effects on the meeting outcomes result.

Information Type and its Impact on Information Dissemination - Zaki, Ahmed S; Hoffman, Richard C (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1988)
A classification scheme for categorizing organizationally relevant information as either vital or supportive is validated empirically. The impact of the hierarchy on information dissemination was found to vary somewhat for both types of information. These results are based on a study of 118 managers at three hierarchical levels from 18 business firms.

Trust and Electronic Government Success: An Empirical Study - Teo, Thompson S H; Srivastava, Shirish C; Jiang, L I (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2008)
Electronic government is being increasingly recognized as a means for transforming public governance. Despite this increasing interest, information systems (IS) literature is mostly silent on what really contributes to the success of e-government Web sites. To fill this gap, this study examines the role of trust in e-government success using the updated DeLone and McLean IS success model as the theoretical framework. The model is tested via a survey of 214 Singapore e-government Web site users. The results show that trust in government, but not trust in technology, is positively related to trust in e-government Web sites. Further, trust in e-government Web sites is positively related to information quality, system quality, and service quality. The quality constructs have different effects on "intention to continue" using the Web site and "satisfaction" with the Web site. Post hoc analysis indicates that the nature of usage (active versus passive users) may help us better understand the interrelationships among success variables examined in this study. This result suggests that the DeLone and McLean model can be further extended by examining the nature of IS use. In addition, it is important to consider the role of trust as well as various Web site quality attributes in understanding e-government success.

1001 Unanswered Research Questions in GSS - Briggs, Robert O; Nunamaker Jr, Jay F; Sprague Jr, Ralph H (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1997)
Introduction to the Special Issue SINCE 1988 WE HAVE HEARD FROM COLLEAGUES AND FRIENDS at almost every MIS conference that group support systems (GSS) research is dead. We are taking the opportunity afforded by this special issue to argue that GSS research is much more like a fresh sapling than a tough and tired forest giant; GSS research is much closer to its beginning than to its end. In this introduction we commend ten fine papers to your attention, then we offer you a challenge: more than 250 unanswered GSS research questions. We know that with just a nudge, you, the readers, will think of many more GSS research questions than we suggest here. We are confident that a proverbial 1001 GSS research streams remain to be explored. We hope you will find the GSS research papers presented in this special issue engaging, and the research questions provocative. We are pleased to present the best GSS research papers from the Thirtieth Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science. Four of the papers were finalists in the Best Paper competition, and one was selected as the Best Paper. Research methods range from rigorous empiricism to action research to meta-analysis. As with so much of MIS research, the papers in this issue range from very behavioral to very technical, but they all contain elements of both. The focus of the first four papers is strongly behavioral. Kelly and Bostrom, in "A Facilitator's General Model for Managing Socio-Emotional Issues in Group Support Systems Meeting Environments," delve into the affective components of facilitating teamwork with GSS. They present a model for perceiving and managing these issues based on structured interviews with twenty-six experienced facilitators. Whether in the electronic boardroom or the electronic classroom, flaming is flaming. In "Flaming in the Electronic Classroom,"Reinig, Briggs, and Nunamaker develop a causal model for flaming in GSS sessions. They test the model with a laboratory experiment and then report on five case studies where teachers in the field used the model to create interventions that eliminated flaming from anonymous electronic interactions among students. In "Information Exchange and Use in GSS and Verbal Group Decision Making: Effects of Minority Influence,"Dennis, Hilmer, and Taylor delve into the difficult terrain of decision making. This paper represents an important trend in GSS research toward studying ideation within the broader context of group processes. The authors found that, when there was a majority/minority split, groups using a particular combination of GSS technology and techniques exchanged more information and made better decisions than did groups with no technology. When there was no opinion split, the same technology/technique combination led to more information exchange, but poorer decisions, which, as is so often the case, opens a whole new set of research questions. Pinsonneault and Heppel offer an interesting theoretical argument about the effects of anonymity on GSS interactions in "Anonymity in Group Support Systems Research: A New Conceptualization, Measure, and Contingency Framework."They argue that social evaluation is an important causal construct in the effects produced by anonymity. They also offer a preliminary instrument for measuring variables related to social evaluation. As this issue went to press, one of the reviewers for this paper collected data using the scales presented here. As the authors caution in their paper, the reviewer's statistical analysis suggested that the scales might require further refinement to improve their reliability, so one cannot take it as given that the instrument has been thoroughly validated. Nonetheless, the theoretical development is innovative and the results of the study are thought provoking. The paper will serve as a launching pad for more sophisticated research on anonymity in GSS. The next two papers address both behavioral and technical issues. Manzoni and Angehrn's "Understanding Organizational Dynamics of IT-Enabled Change: A Multimedia Simulation Approach"addresses the use of an animated simulation for training IT managers to overcome resistance to change. The simulation embodies virtual people with distinct personalities and hidden agendas. This work points the way toward broader use of organizational games as pedagogical tools to provide managers with realistic experiential learning environments. In "Collaborative Business Engineering with Animated Electronic Meetings,"de Vreede breaks new ground in an action research study with the Amsterdam Municipal Police. He combines static and dynamic process models with GSS to support teams evaluating current and future work practices. He develops new concepts of operation for GSS and for simulation in support of organizational change. The three papers that follow have a strong technical flavor, but, as always in MIS, the work has behavioral and organizational implications as well. Software is becoming more and more integrated into our lives. It is embedded in everything from airplane parts to dishwashers. Van Genuchten, in his award-winning paper, "Supporting Inspections with an Electronic Meeting System,"addresses the use of GSS to support Fagan inspections for structured reviews of systems development documents intended to identify and log defects as early in a project as possible. He reports on fourteen field cases and concludes that the use of GSS can substantially improve the inspection process, revealing more defects more quickly than would otherwise be possible. For the past thirty years MIS has faced the same set of problems: poor estimates, cost overruns, and systems that do not meet the needs of the users. The holy grail of MIS research has long been finding a way to allow the users to define their requirements for a new information system, and then to have tools automatically generate first logical and physical designs, and then the code. Getting the users involved has been an elusive goal. In "The Involvement of Multiple Users: Methods and Tools or Software Engineering,"Dean, Lee, Pendergast, Hickey, and Nunamaker report on a research stream that has made a substantial step toward that goal. They report on the development of GSS tools specifically for capturing system requirements from users, and they report on the results of several field studies where these tools were used. In the most technical of the papers in this special issue, Bui, Bodart, and Ma propose a formal language to support and document argumentation, claims, decision and negotiation, and coordination in network-based organizations. The paper, "ARBAS: A Formal Language to Support Argumentation in Network-Based Organizations,"proposes that the language be used over the Internet to create a corporate memory of otherwise ephemeral interactions. The work in this paper harks back to and builds upon the foundation of the work of Bodart and others on Problem Statement Language/Problem Statement Analyzer (PSL/PSA). Despite its highly technical orientation, the paper also has social, legal, and behavioral implications. Finally, in an unprecedented move, we are holding what would have been the tenth paper in this issue over to become the anchor of next year's special issue. Fjermestad and Hiltz have spent several years preparing an exhaustive analysis of all GSS laboratory research that has ever been published. This paper offers a categorical framework for organizing GSS research and examines the studies in terms of methods, independent variables, dependent variables, and results. Because of the completeness of its coverage, this paper will serve as an important foundation and as a launching pad for much GSS research for many years to come. The paper is necessarily quite long, and given the choice of losing some of its value by shortening it or holding it over to present it in its entirety, we opted for the latter. We are pleased the authors have chosen this forum for their work, and we look forward to its debut next year. GSS Research A T THE CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, A LEARNED PHYSICIST asserted that his discipline was nearly complete. Other than a few loose ends, nothing else remained to be learned. Of course, the loose ends turned out to be the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and nuclear physics, among others. In 1943, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., chairman of IBM, said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers ."As the twenty-first century approaches, the assertion has begun to circulate among IS academics that group support systems (GSS) research is dead, that other than a few loose ends, nothing remains to be learned. For more than a decade researchers have been developing and testing group support systems [14, 17, 20, 32, 33, 58]. GSS are suites of tools designed to focus the deliberation and enhance the communication of teams working under high cognitive loads. Research from both the field and the laboratory has shown that teams using GSS can become far more productive than would otherwise be possible [11, 14, 17, 22, 30, 32, 33, 36, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 53, 55]. Independent case studies across several organizations around the world have demonstrated that teams using GSS have reduced their labor costs by as much as 50 percent and have reduced the number of calendar days in their projects up to 90 percent [12, 16, 22, 38, 43]. Although GSS is not yet widely deployed, it has already been used by several million people. It has developed beyond the academic sandbox to become a key resource in more than 1,500 organizations, many of which report millions of dollars of cost savings and cost avoidance from its use [43, 54]. More than 140 GSS experiments have already been reported in the GSS literature [17], as have dozens of field studies [11]. With what has been done, is there really anything else important to study about GSS? Most emphatically, yes. There are still many more questions than answers in GSS research. Existing studies have touched only the edges of the vast technology-for-teams territory. We hope herein to illuminate some of the rich GSS research opportunities that must yet be taken. What Is a GSS? A GROUP SUPPORT SYSTEM EASES THE COGNITIVE LOAD OF TEAMS working in concert toward a mutual goal. Sometimes team members "all talk at once"by typing their ideas simultaneously into a network of computer workstations. The system immediately makes all these contributions available to other members of the team who can read them on their individual screens. This allows the entire team to hear from every member in about the same time it would normally take to hear from only one [32, 37]. At other times, teams use a GSS to cooperate while separated by space and time. Sometimes teams use GSS anonymously to raise and explore new and perhaps unpopular or politically risky ideas that a member might otherwise be reluctant to voice for fear of reprisal from peers or superiors. The anonymity allows participants to evaluate an idea based on its merits rather than on its source. Other teams find it useful to make fully identified contributions, so team members can assess the expertise of the contributor, or so they can hold one another accountable for action items. A group support system is a suite of software tools, each of which focuses team efforts in some unique way [37]. A brainstorming tool, for example, encourages a team to diverge from its customary thinking patterns, to go farther afield to find as many new ideas as possible in a brief time. In contrast, other tools encourage a group to converge quickly on a set of key issues, or to explore a defined set of issues in great depth and detail. A GSS tool kit may also include tools to support team writing, polling for consensus, evaluation of alternatives, and other activities for working together toward a goal, whether a team is working at the same time in the same place or is separated across many time zones and working asynchronously [37]. GSS Research Questions T HIS PAPER PRESENTS A SERIES OF RESEARCH QUESTIONS ORGANIZED under major headings. The list of questions in each heading is by no means exhaustive; indeed, even the set of headings is not exhaustive. However, this set of questions may be sufficient to persuade the reader that GSS will remain a rich field for academic endeavor for some time to come. Ideation Issues Much of the early GSS research focused on improving ideation processes. Every aspect of problem solving requires ideation. People produce more ideas with GSS than without GSS [19, 24, 26, 53]. People working with a critical evaluative tone produced more ideas than people with an affirmative evaluative tone [10]. People who broke the problem down to subproblems generated more ideas than people who worked with a problem as a whole. People with a basis for social comparison produced more than people with no such basis [49]. These interesting and useful findings have been the basis for many successful GSS interactions. However, many questions about GSS ideation remain unanswered. For example, it might be useful to know the distribution of good ideas over time so the team can make informed choices about how long to spend on ideation. When do the best ideas come? Early? Late? Evenly spaced throughout? Why? What might it cost a group in terms of good ideas if they cut ideation short? What if they stress the participants, insisting on rapid ideation without reflection? Field and lab experience suggests that the facilitation method used with the GSS has a strong effect on ideation [1, 9, 15, 18, 29, 52, 58], but to date only three or four ideation techniques have been rigorously examined. What other facilitation techniques might improve ideation? Do differences in leadership approach result in differing distributions of good ideas over time? Are those differences important to group productivity? There are a variety of electronic tools to support ideation [37]. Some start each participant on a different electronic page, while others start participants on the same electronic page. What interfaces are best for supporting electronic ideation processes under what conditions? When is a group outline more effective for ideation than a shared flat list? How does the tradeoff between quality and quantity play out during ideation with a GSS? Do silly ideas inspire good ideas? At what point does the volume of bad ideas overwhelm the cognitive resources of the participants? Convergence Issues People produce many ideas with electronic brainstorming tools, some good, some bad. A great deal of research has been published about ideation, but almost nothing has been written about helping a group converge on the best ideas among all those generated. Convergence can be a slow, painful process [8]. Is there an optimal process for converging on the best ideas? How does a group decide what constitutes a good idea? What processes might help a group converge on the best ideas more effectively? What leadership techniques might ease the pain of convergence? When is chauffeured list building more effective than simultaneous team list building? How might artificial intelligence aid the ideation process? In recent years researchers have begun to investigate supporting geographically separated and asynchronous team work [23, 34, 35, 46, 47, 51, 52]. They report that convergence is much more difficult with distributed teams than with face-to-face teams. Why is this so? What can be done to improve matters? Questions about Deliberation Idea generation and convergence are critical in all aspects of teamwork. However, there is much more to teamwork than just idea generation [4, 37, 44]. Consider the problem-solving process: sense making, alternative generation, alternative evaluation, choice making, implementation planning, results monitoring. Each of these steps is critically important, and yet very little is yet known about the use of GSS to support each of these phases. Do people who use electronic brainstorming tools explore the problem space more completely? Under what conditions do they converge on an optimal understanding of the problem? Under what conditions do they select poor explanations of their problem? What leadership or facilitation techniques lead to optimal exploration of problem space? Is there a single optimal approach to such exploration, or does it vary by task? Group? Technology? Which alternative evaluation techniques are effective? Does that vary with the task at hand? Under what circumstances do people using GSS make better choices than people working without GSS? Which GSS tools and techniques improve choice making and which hurt it? Does it depend on the technology at hand? The team? If so, how? Why? What combination of technology and technique will produce the most effective plans? How can GSS be used to break an impasse? How can GSS be used to move teams toward consensus? What can be done with GSS to move plans forward? To track progress? To hold team members responsible for one another? This deliberation process has emerged out of millennia of human experience, but that experience was unsupported by electronic technology. Is that process still optimal? Are there ways of short-circuiting the process with technology? Questions of GSS and Information Access One important function of a GSS is to give the group ready access to information--information stored on-line and information stored in the minds of the group members--but only a few groundbreaking pieces of research have examined information access in the GSS environment. Information has value to the degree that it is timely, accurate, and complete. However, its value is offset by the cognitive costs of searching for, assimilating, and remembering the information. Does GSS give a team access to more information more quickly? More accurately? More completely? At what cognitive cost? Can GSS be used to reduce the cost of finding information? Assimilating it? Retrieving it? One function of information is to increase the probability that an actor will expect the outcome the actor actually obtains when choosing one course of action over another. Do teams using GSS expect their outcomes more frequently than teams who do not use GSS? Does that depend on the task? The team? The technology? Another function of information is to increase the actor's awareness that possibilities exist. Do people using GSS consider more alternatives than others? Are they more effective at selecting among them? Why or why not? Helmut Krcmar of Hohenheim University in Germany defines information as "A model of something, for some purpose."The same information can be modeled in many different ways. Can GSS be used to present models that are more easily assimilated? Can it be used to produce such models? Do people using GSS seek different kinds of information than people who do not? What is the effect of that difference? Do people who use GSS purpose different things than people who do not? Is that good? Always? Why? GSS and Communication Issues One of the benefits GSS brings to a group is the ability to communicate in parallel, which may allow people to share information and expertise more quickly [37]. Is that sharing as complete with GSS as it with other media? Under what circumstances do people choose to attend to the contributions of others? Under what circumstances do they ignore one another's work? Does this change over time? Does it change over tasks? Are there processes for increasing the degree to which people attend to one another's ideas? When is this a desirable outcome? Are there advantages to serial communication that are lost during parallel communication? What are the political implications of a channel where nobody can shout down an opponent? Do people express the same ideas on a keyboard that they would express orally? Are there new and better means of expression than those that now exist? Does a message carry more weight if it appears on a screen than when it enters the ears? If so, under what circumstances might that difference be desirable? Undesirable? Questions about GSS and Goal Congruence In order to be productive, a team may use a GSS to reduce the cognitive loads associated with communication, deliberation, and information access. However, no technology can improve the productivity of people who choose to be unproductive [4]. People hold many, sometimes mutually exclusive, personal goals: To survive and thrive, to be accepted and loved, to look good, to hold a job, to get ahead--the list is endless. Teams accept many tasks. People will only make an effort to achieve the team goal to the extent that the team goal is compatible with whatever private goals are salient to the individuals on the team. How can a GSS be used to establish and maintain goal congruence? Can it be used to reveal hidden agendas? Is that desirable? Always? Can it be used to change the salience of personal goals? Anonymity is a goal-congruence issue that has received some attention in the GSS literature. A great deal of work has been done to examine the effects of anonymity on idea generation [10, 24, 25, 26, 27, 48, 56]. Teams produce more ideas when working anonymously than when identified. There is some thinking that this is the combined result of two goal-congruence effects. Researchers have posited that people may be reluctant to propose ideas that might garner negative reactions from peers or superiors. Allowing them to work anonymously may overcome this reluctance. While many papers have offered this explanation, no study has yet tested it. Will the evaluation-apprehension model stand up to rigorous scrutiny? Social loafing research suggests that people generating ideas anonymously do not expend as much effort when working anonymously as they do when working identified [41, 48]. This may also be a goal-congruence issue. Do people make more effort when identified to avoid social sanctions? Do they value credit for their work more than they value the output of their effort? Why? How can GSS be built or used differently to overcome social loafing without sacrificing the other benefits of anonymity? Other than increased ideation, what benefits are there to anonymity? What are the costs? Which team processes are helped by anonymity? Which are not? Organizational Implications of GSS New technologies often change the way entire industries do business. The business processes were often not even imaginable before the advent of the technology. For instance, American Hospital Supply placed computer terminals at their customers' sites and revolutionized their industry. Before the advent of computerized transactions, a bank could only be open to the public a few hours of the day. With ATM cards, we now do much of our banking in the parking lot, and some if it at the grocery store. What new organizational forms are now possible with GSS? What new organizational forms might be desirable? What impact will those new forms have on organizational structure and power distributions? One of the key changes we have observed in the field is that many managers and knowledge workers use GSS to support meetings where they actually do work rather than just planning to do work [32, 35]. What effect might this change have on the productivity of a team? An organization? Are organizations doing more work with fewer people because of GSS? Unanswered Questions about Process Gains and Losses In 1991, we noted that GSS might offer certain process gains to a team, and that these gains were, to some extent, offset by process losses. Table 1 lists some of those gains and losses. To date, few of these gains and losses have been explored in detail. Most have been subjected to no rigorous academic investigation. To what extent are these factors important to the outcomes of a GSS meeting? To what extent do they interact? To what extent are they cumulative, or mutually exclusive? Questions of Ethics Teams may use GSS to make choices about the use of scarce resources, and these choices may have permanent consequences for the participants and for non-participants. What ethical issues must be considered in the use of GSS? When important decisions are made by groups of unidentifiable individuals, who is accountable? Who should be rewarded? Who should be blamed? Are these issues different because the GSS is being used, or are they the same issues that already arise in standard human interactions? The transcripts of electronic meetings are more permanent than spoken words. Who owns these transcripts? The participants? All the participants? The organizations for whom they work? Who has the right to destroy the transcripts? Under what conditions may the transcripts be made public? Under what circumstances should an organization be held liable for an anonymous contribution to a GSS session? Team Telework Issues The emergence of the global marketplace may drive the development of GSS over the next decade. More and more geographically distributed teams are using GSS and other collaborative technology to facilitate team telework [46, 47]. While the demand for team telework grows, little is known about how to actually conduct team telework. How can leaders move a group through a process? How can technology replace the rich nonverbal cues of face-to-face work? What cues should be replaced? Should they be directly replaced, or are there technological surrogates that differ substantially from the original cues? What must be done to create a sense of presence among people who are geographically separated? Is a sense of presence necessary? Is it desirable? Are there tasks that are best done face to face? Are there tasks that are best done distributed? Which are they? Why? What can be done to motivate the efforts of geographically distributed team members? What can be done to monitor their motivation? Do the same features and functions that support face-to-face groups support geographically separated groups just as well? What new features and functions might be required? Why? How must GSS be designed or used differently to support synchronous distributed work than for asynchronous work? What changes in GSS technology and group process will be required to support collaboration for teams distributed along the dimensions of time, space, and computing resources? What are the requirements for a distributed group support system that extend beyond those used in face-to-face systems, in terms of data content, interface presentation, and tool and resource features? How do the roles of facilitators, team leaders, and participants in distributed settings change from those in face-to-face settings? Cultural and Cross-Cultural Issues The vast majority of GSS research has focused on GSS usage in American and European corporate culture. What would GSS look like if designed specifically for use in Europe, Asia, or Australia? Will Japanese teams require different GSS support than German teams? How about teams with members from both Japan and Germany? Much of the work on cross-cultural teams is bilateral, dealing with how members of one culture can adapt to better interact with members of another culture. Can GSS provide a new common ground for interaction among several cultures? What if group members do not share a common language? What if group members do not share a common set of culturally based group norms? When does an international video conference make more sense than a trip around the world? When doesn't it? How does the role of the facilitator change from one culture to the next? What affect does culture have on the adoption of GSS? What affect does culture have on satisfaction with GSS technologies? Can GSS be used to maintain a sense of togetherness among distributed multicultural employees of a multination corporation? Given that over 140 GSS experimental studies have been published, how many of these findings can be generalized to Asian, South American, Australian, African, or European cultures? What is the role of GSS in the global village? Group Negotiation Questions Recently, a probation officer suggested that GSS could be used to facilitate communication between members of opposing gangs. He suggested that the anonymity would allow the rival members to speak to each other not as a gang representative but as an individual that may allow them to find a common ground from which to resolve their differences. Do GSS have a role in this type of meeting environment? What is the potential for this type of application? What would a GSS look like if it were designed for gang leaders instead of corporate leaders? What other types of group therapy might have members who are reluctant to express themselves and could potentially benefit from GSS? GSS and Business Process Reengineering Recently, advances have been made in the development of specific GSS tools to support the process of business reengineering such as the Enterprise Analyzer. How effective are these tools? What is the role of GSS in reengineering? To what extent can GSS be integrated with other reengineering software such as CASE tools? Leadership and Process Structure Issues Research has shown that even with a single GSS tool, a single, subtle difference in leadership method can lead to massive differences in group dynamics and productivity [48]. What other leadership methods might lead to similar differences? Under what conditions do teams perform better under a leader who uses GSS to structure and focus group processes? Under what conditions do groups perform better when they use the GSS with no leader and no structure? How can leaders use GSS to uncover hidden agendas among group members? Is uncovering hidden agendas necessarily a good thing? Why or why not? What effect does it have on group process for the group to surface hidden agendas? Adoption and Diffusion of GSS What causes an organization to adopt GSS? Research shows that teams using GSS save 50 percent to 70 percent of their labor costs and reduce their project cycle times by 90 percent. However, technology cannot benefit those who choose not to use it. Despite the massive successes of GSS in many organizations, the technology is diffusing slowly. Given the payoffs, why isn't GSS technology spreading like wildfire? Are the organizational changes surrounding the introduction of GSS too painful? Are the GSS tools too awkward or technically complex for most people to use? Are there affective issues that hinder diffusion? Social issues? Is it simply a lack of information or understanding that keeps people from using the technology? For GSS to be an organizational success, one must plan for and overcome resistance to change. In The Prince (written around 1500), Machiavelli made an insightful observation about change that may be relevant to GSS research: "There is nothing more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through than initiating changes to the state's constitution. The innovator makes enemies of all those who have prospered under the old order, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new." Thomas Edison saw the difficulty of change as well: "The Inventor can't do it all. You've got to change people. We have an enormous capacity to invent super-machinery. But our desire to install the device is weak. Human inertia is the problem, not invention. Something in man makes him resist change." [February 1923] Does the technology violate powerful political interests within organizations? Or is it simply that, all things being equal, people resist change? In either case, what change management processes will work? What incentive and social structures could be created to ease the transition? What payoffs would be sufficient to offset the cost of change? How can we measure the benefits and costs of GSS? Some speculate that the champions of GSS within an organization gain high visibility and receive rapid promotions away from the GSS-related job. This strands the technology without a champion, making the diffusion process self-extinguishing. Is the process really self-extinguishing? If so, what can be done? GSS and Electronic Commerce GSS tools are now available on the World Wide Web, allowing people from different organizations to join a collaborative problem-solving session with minimal effort. What role might GSS take in supporting interorganizational cooperation? What role might it play in fostering electronic commerce? For example, a major management trend is the development of "virtual corporations"--sets of separate organizational entities tightly linked by strategic alliances. Can GSS be instrumental in defining, nurturing, and monitoring the relationships on which these alliances are based? How are GSS best structured and used for these purposes? Intranets promise to redefine traditional corporate computing. GSS may become part of an integrated I/S architecture, with one common interface, instead of a separate application. How would that architecture be structured? What relative roles would be played by GSS? Collaborative Modeling and Simulation Often people use GSS to collect and collate information about the parameters of their problem space or their solution space. Recent pilot efforts have demonstrated the technical feasibility of rolling team-generated parameters into models and simulations to support design and decision-making activities. What processes are suitable to optimize team parameterization of models? How do teams perceive the information in the models? Are team-generated simulations more accurate or more complete than individually generated simulations? Can teams build simulations more quickly than individuals? Do teams make better choices when supported by team simulations? Under what circumstances? GSS Software and Network Architectures GSS software has evolved through four architectures: Mainframe, DOS/flat-file/LAN, Windows/Database/LAN, and now WEB-based client-server [46, 47]. To date, no rigorous academic investigations of GSS software architecture have been conducted. How can one optimize the software architecture to assure rapid interface response for users, while accommodating low-speed and intermittent data communication channels? Is client-server the optimal software architecture for collaborative technology? Why or why not? Should a client be thick, with most of the processing done at the client end, or thin, with most of the processing done at the server? What are the tradeoffs for making this choice? Where should the data reside? Locally? Remotely? Both? Should the system push data or poll for it? How should the architecture of the GSS accommodate other applications? How could the architecture be designed to support rapid prototyping of new tools? GSS for Crisis Response When responding to a crisis, a leader must quickly bring the right people together--those with the right information, expertise, and leadership ability. These people must continuously develop and evaluate possible courses of action in response to the unfolding situation. Cognitive processes for people working under time pressure are substantially different than for people working at a more deliberate pace. Do current GSS tools provide adequate support for crisis response? What new tools might be required? What new processes might be required for teams in crisis? People under time pressure are far better at comparative decision making than at judgment. Do current GSS tools and techniques take best advantage of this situation? Individuals working under time pressure are better at naturalistic decision making than at rational decision making. In naturalistic decision making, an expert perceives key cues, matches them with internal patterns, performs an immediate diagnosis, and recommends a single solution. With rationalistic decision making, the decision maker generates and evaluates alternatives, then selects a course of action. However, some problems are large enough that no single decision maker has all the expertise or information or resources to solve the problem alone, and so decisions must be made by groups. Can GSS be used to move groups closer to the naturalistic model of decision making? Is that desirable? Will that effort require new GSS tools? Techniques? Virtual Workspace Issues A great deal of research has been published about teams using GSS in the same place at the same time. Recent field investigations suggest that people using GSS to support distributed collaboration have difficulty maintaining a sense of the group and its processes [46, 47]. It may be that the use of Virtual Reality (VR) interfaces [49, 50, 57] for GSS could alleviate many of these difficulties. The VR could provide an avatar that represented each member of the group and provided clues to what the group members were doing. What information should a group VR environment provide? What features and functions should it supply? Should the space be represented realistically--with gravity, walls, floors, desks, light switches, wall-sized screens? Should the virtual space be represented in ways that have nothing to do with physical space--no gravity, floating objects, embedded data? Why or why not? How should the team navigate through the space? Should avatars be able to pass through one another? Should they be able to establish private communication channels for their principals? Team Interface Design While it is clear that subtle differences in interface can cause major differences in group dynamics [48], little systematic research into GSS interface design has been done [21]. Shepherd, Briggs, Reinig, Yen, and Nunamaker [48] showed that a single horizontal line on one GSS interface led to an increase of 23 percent in ideation productivity. When combined with a new facilitation technique, productivity increased 63 percent. What other subtle differences in interface design might lead to similar or even larger improvements? How are team interfaces different than individual interfaces? What hidden costs might be associated with these increases in productivity? How much more productivity might be possible? Shared Drawing Questions With a few notable exceptions, most GSS technology is text-based, yet we observe that people often sketch and draw when they are working face to face. Developers have begun implementing shared whiteboards and shared graphics tools. Under what conditions are these tools more useful than text-based tools? There is little descriptive or prescriptive information available specifically about sketching. Will computer-based tools encourage more drawing? Will this make a difference for a group? What theoretical basis could best govern the development and use of shared drawing tools? Communication theory? Esthetics theory? Productivity theory? All three? Something else? For what kinds of tasks will shared drawing be useful? Useless? Why? Must shared drawing tools be different for representational drawing and conceptual drawing? How important is response time for clear communication? Should drawing capability be included in text tools? Should one be able to mark up text with drawings? Why? Are people more efficient at creating drawn artifacts with electronic tools or manual tools? Under what conditions would that matter? How might a group take advantage of the ability of an electronic tool to time-scroll, which is to undraw and redraw an image? Under what conditions do shared drawing tools make a team more effective? Cohesive? Satisfied? When might a team prefer a symbol-and-arrow tool to shared whiteboard, and vice versa? Should there be a single shared cursor? A cursor for each participant? No cursor? Should WYSIWIS be enforced? Optional? Ignored? Why? What new team processes might become possible that were not even contemplated before the advent of shared drawing tools? GSS in the Classroom A growing community of researchers is beginning to explore the use of GSS to support learning [2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 28, 45, 55, 56]. In the past three years, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science has published dozens of papers on the topic. Experience suggests that cooperative learning can be substantially enhanced through the judicious use of GSS. They are also finding that successful use of GSS requires a fundamental shift in the thinking paradigm of the instructor. Experience shows that standard classroom instruction and standard in-service training have been ineffective for conveying that paradigm shift. The presence of a researcher in the room for a year has been an effective but very inefficient method of inducing the change. Is there a shorter, less expensive way to achieve the change? What can be done to cause a paradigm shift among teachers? Will GSS have to become more simple to use? Will instruction have to become more rigorous? The military uses boot camp to instill new values in recruits. Will a boot camp approach work with teachers? What other innovative approaches might apply? What course materials might enhance the use of GSS in the classroom? Who should create those materials? Teachers? Vendors? The learners themselves? Research on GSS-for-learning has focused on engaging the learners in solving real problems. Are there other approaches that might be effective? How do we measure whether the GSS interventions are actually increasing learning? Conclusion A T THIS POINT WE MUST LEAVE OUR RECITATION OF GSS research questions, not for lack of issues but for lack of space. We hope we have broadened your perspective on GSS. Since 1988 it has been a yearly event at ICIS, and more recently at AIS, to pronounce the demise of GSS research. Yet in this one paper we have identified the potential for at least 250 more doctoral dissertations. Each dissertation would make a substantial contribution to our understanding of GSS, and each would be likely to uncover deeper and more interesting questions than those posed here. Rhetorically speaking, there are 1001 questions yet to be answered. GSS research is like a cathedral whose foundations have been laid and whose supporting pillars are under construction. Still to come are the high stone walls, the vaulted ceilings, and the tracery stained glass windows. 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Understanding the use of group decision support systems: the theory of adaptive structuration. In J. Fulk and C. Steinfield (eds.), Organizations and Communication Technology . Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990, pp. 173-193. 43. Post, B.Q. Building the business case for group support technology. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science , vol. 4, January 1992, pp. 34-45. 44. Romano, N.C., Jr. Are collaborative tools really collaborative? AS/400 Systems Management (August 1996), 61. 45. Romano, N.C., Jr., and Balthazard, P.A. Computer literacy instruction using nonlinear environments. Journal of Education for Management Information Systems , 1 , 1 (1993), 11-18. 46. Romano, N.C., Jr.; Nunamaker J.F., Jr.; and Briggs, R.O. User driven design of a Web-based group support system. Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences , vol. 2, January 1997, pp. 366-375. 47. 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Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences , vol. 3, January 1996, pp. 283-292. 57. Watson, M. AI agents in virtual reality worlds: programming intelligent VR in C++ . New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996. 58. Watson, R.T.; DeSanctis, G.; and Poole, M. S. Using a GDSS to facilitate group consensus: some intended and unintended consequences. MIS Quarterly , 12 , 3 (September 1988), 463-480. Key words and phrases : ,

Special Issue: Immersive Systems - Cavusoglu, Huseyin; Dennis, Alan R; Parsons, Jeffrey (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
HUSEYIN CAVUSOGLU (huseyin@utdallas.edu) is a Professor of Information Systems in Naveen Jindal School of Management at University of Texas at Dallas. His research interest lies at the intersection of economics and information systems, exploring the economic implications of emerging information technologies and technology artifacts. He has organized IS conferences and workshops and served as an associate editor on a number of special issues. His research papers received several best paper awards and nominations in prestigious IS conferences. ALAN R. DENNIS (ardennis@indiana.edu) is Professor of Information Systems and holds the John T. Chambers Chair of Internet Systems in the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.. Professor Dennis has written more than 150 research papers and has won numerous awards for his theoretical and applied research. His research focuses on three main themes: team collaboration; fake news on social media; and information security. He is a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems and has founded AIS SIGGAME (Special Interest Group on Game Design and Research). He has served the editorial board of Journal of Management Information Systems for two decades. JEFFREY PARSONS (jeffreyp@mun.ca) is University Research Professor and Professor of Information Systems in the Faculty of Business Administration at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His research interests include the role game mechanisms can play in improving data quality in user-generated content, as well as the design and evaluation of augmented reality applications. He serves as a Senior Editor for MIS Quarterly and has been a Senior Editor for Journal of the Association for Information Systems and an Associate Editor for Information Systems Research. Immersive systems purposefully change or enhance the user’s perception of reality. They include such categories as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (VR/AR), gamified applications, and serious games. For example, the recent introduction of inexpensive consumer-grade VR headsets from a variety of manufacturers has generated new interest as a way for companies to enhance existing systems and create new opportunities to engage employees and customers [e.g., 1, 4, 9, 10]. Gamification is the addition of game design elements to non-game systems, which might encompass the addition of: game mechanics (e.g., points), dynamics (e.g., challenging interactions), aesthetics (e.g., video), or narratives (e.g., fantasy) to work-related systems [e.g., 2, 7, 8]. Serious games are digital games that aim to leverage the engaging and entertaining aspect of interactive games to achieve at least one work-related goal other than entertainment [e.g., 3, 5, 6]. This Special Issue focuses on business-related immersive systems: that is, the addition of immersive elements to information systems that support organizational goals. Such systems may be internally-focused (e.g., systems that support employees in their work) or externally-focused (e.g., systems that engage consumers to generate new product ideas or solve problems). In either case, the systems are instrumental, but with immersive elements added. The first article, by Steffen et al, presents a framework of affordances for virtually assisted activities compared to the affordances of physical reality. This framework enables the direct comparison of virtualized activities to non-virtualized activities, comparison of similar activities across VR and AR, and delineates areas of inquiry for future research. The article validates the framework through two quantitative studies and one qualitative study. The key contribution of this article is that it presents a general theory-based framework for developing and testing VR and AR applications that can be used across a variety of different settings. Fang et al. examine the effects of social influence on willingness to pay in freemium social games. Based on the cohesion effect, they hypothesize that a game player’s willingness to pay is positively related to that of his/her friends, and that there will be differences in willingness to pay depending on whether the friends are pure friends or Simmelian-tie friends. Using data from a social game, they find that the cohesion affect positively affects willingness to pay and that the effect is stronger for pure friends than for Simmelian-tie friends. Implications for freemium social games are discussed. Peukert et al. examine the role of immersion on intent to reuse an online shopping environment. They propose a theoretical model based on utilitarian and hedonic factors to explain how the level of immersion affects adoption and test this model in a laboratory experiment. Results show that immersion positively affects the hedonic pathway to adoption via telepresence and negatively affects the utilitarian pathway to adoption via product diagnosticity. Implications of the findings in the face of rapidly changing immersive technology are discussed. Yang and Xiong study the virtual fitting room (VFR) technology and its impact on sales and post-sales outcomes. They conduct two large-scale field experiments to test the causal effects of different VFR designs, and a lab experiment to uncover the underlying theoretical mechanisms. They find that, although VFR can have a sizeable positive effect on sales, it can be counterproductive when used improperly. Specifically, personalized VFR may not increase sales if used in combination with conventional product visualizations because self-discrepancy becomes salient under this condition. Moreover, VFR significantly influences post-sales outcomes by enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing the product return rate. Implications of VFR for practitioners are discussed. Liu et al. investigate how gesture-based interaction modes affect consumers’ virtual product experiences (VPE) by eliciting mental imagery (i.e., haptic imagery and spatial imagery). Furthermore, they explore how visual product presentation can be designed to facilitate different types of interaction modes. Through a lab experiment, they find that touchscreen gesture outperforms mid-air gesture and mouse-based interaction in terms of eliciting haptic imagery, and this effect is mitigated when 3D presentation is used. They also find that mid-air gesture outperforms touchscreen gesture and mouse-based interaction in terms of eliciting spatial imagery when 3D presentation is used. Implications for retailers, marketers, and designers are discussed. The papers in this Special Issue show that research on immersive systems creates opportunities to bring together diverse perspectives from behavioral, design science, and economics research traditions to develop cumulative knowledge in this growing area. We hope these papers will trigger new explorations and significant breakthroughs in our understanding of the development, adoption, use, and impacts of immersive systems. This research is also relevant to subject matter experts, such as marketers and managers who wish to effectively create, understand, and use immersive systems. Thus, we encourage intra- and inter-disciplinary research on immersive systems. References 1.Biocca, F.; Owen, C.; Tang, A.; and Bohil, C. Attention issues in spatial information systems: Directing mobile users’ visual attention using augmented reality. Journal of Management Information Systems, 23, 4 (2007), 163–184. 2.Cavusoglu, H.; Zhuolun, L.; and Huang, K. W. Can gamification motivate voluntary contributions? The case of stack overflow Q&A community. ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW 2015), Vancouver, Canada. 3.Dörner, R.; Göbel, S.; Effelsberg, W.; and Wiemeyer, J. Serious Games Foundations, Concepts and Practice. Switzerland: Springer, 2016. 4.Franceschi, K.; Lee, R.M.; Zanakis, S.H.; and Hinds, D. Engaging group e-learning in virtual worlds. Journal of Management Information Systems, 26, 1 (2009), 73–100. 5.Goode, S.; Shailer, G.; Wilson, M.; and Jankowski, J. Gifting and status in virtual worlds. Journal of Management Information Systems, 31, 2 (2014), 171–210. 6.Li, M.; Jiang, Q.; Tan, C.H.; and Wei, K.K. Enhancing user-game engagement through software gaming elements. Journal of Management Information Systems, 30, 4 (201), 115–150. 7.Liu, De; Santhanam, R.; and Webster, J. "Toward meaningful engagement: A Framework for design and research of gamified information systems," MIS Quarterly, 41, 4 (2017), 1011–1034. 8.Mingay, S.; and Geschickter, C. Gamification opportunities for utilities and corporate sustainability. Gartner Research Notes, G00235813 (2012) 1–13. available online at https://www.gartner.com/doc/2233115/gamification-opportunities-utilities-corporate-sustainability, 9.Wang, Y.; and Haggerty, N. Individual virtual world competence and its influence on work outcomes. Journal of Management Information Systems, 27, 4 (2011), 299–334. 10.Zahedi, F.M.; Walia, N.; and Jain, H. Augmented virtual doctor office: Theory-based design and assessment. Journal of Management Information Systems, 33, 3 (2016), pp. 776–808.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2013)
WITH THE PRESENT ISSUE, the Journal of Management Information Systems is opening its 30th volume. This is certainly an occasion to celebrate. The field of information systems (IS) and the Journal have traveled a long path of everyday toil and uncommon discovery. The world, and its societies and organizations, have been transformed by information systems and by the technologies around which they are built. Our working and personal lives have been changed, have moved closer to each other, and are now lived on the world scene and at a more rapid pace. Indeed, our understanding of the life we lead has been transmogrified by our ability to connect and by the opportunities and challenges of cohabitation with the artifacts borne of information technologies. It falls to our discipline to help the world to understand and meet these challenges and to develop and exploit these opportunities. Scholarly journals have been a primary means of disciplinary development for 350 years. They are a discipline's treasury. The leading journals of a discipline have the heavy responsibility of defining it as a research field. JMIS is consistently ranked as one of the top three IS journals. It has always been a key objective of the Journal to meet the expanding role of information technology (IT) with tche expansion of the profile of our IS discipline. Our scholarly field seeks to understand how systems can be organized, developed, and deployed effectively to manage information and knowledge toward specified outcomes, in order to support organizations, marketplaces, and products. Within this disciplinary commitment, we should range widely, I believe. Methodological pluralism is necessary to advance our knowledge and to advance our field. Further, we are not and we should not be importers and adapters of knowledge from other disciplines or aim at becoming major exporters as the measure of our success. We should realize that the embeddedness in the societies, organizations, practices, and products is in the very nature of information systems and technology. Consequently, we should not seek sharp boundaries, and we should see the value of interdisciplinary work centering on IT-based systems and their use to the world at large, to the advance of knowledge-and to our field. Several important subfields and research streams of IS have originated with the scholarly work published in JMIS. Among the more important I can mention these: scholarly assessment of the business value of information systems, real options theory in IS, design science, negotiation support systems, and service science. We have been the early champion of economics research in our field. The work on collaboration and group support published in the Journal has set the agenda for this important research stream. Among other recent initiatives, the innovative Special Issue on Neuroscience and IS Research is currently being developed by its authoritative Guest Editorial Board. As IT moves to the ever new frontiers, so do we who wish to understand and develop the capabilities of information systems built around this technology conglomeration. The two papers that open the 30th volume present empirical investigations of the role of senior IS executives in the firm's success and reputation. The first, by Elena Karahanna and David S. Preston, studies the effect of the three dimensions of social capital that emerges from the relationship between the chief information officer (CIO) and the top management team (TMT) on the IS strategic alignment and, consequently, on the firm's performance. The empirics are obtained in the setting of the U.S. hospital industry. The results clearly show the influence of the relationship between the CIO and TMT and, further, of the alignment between the business and IS strategies, on financial performance. The lens of social capital allows for a nuanced understanding of the wellsprings of that influence and performance. With the strategic role of IS intensifying, a reputation for superior capability in that domain is desired by companies, if only in view of its influence on the capital markets and of the competitive image at large. Here, Jee-Hae Lim, Theophanis C. Stratopoulos, and Tony S. Wirjanto show empirically that this reputation depends on the culture of reciprocity between the TMT and the top IS executives of the firm in which these executives are accorded the power and visibility that helps them to execute their strategies for IS. The authors build their project on institutional theory. Taken together with the preceding work, the two papers offer distinct practical insights for the firms that increasingly depend on IS in successfully executing their business strategies. An important contribution to our understanding of the role of IT in national productivity is made by the work presented by Jason Dedrick, Kenneth L. Kraemer, and Eric Shih. It had been shown before that IT investment is associated with productivity gains in developed countries. The present authors show that this is also true for a large upper layer of developing countries, consisting of 45 countries. They also show the factors that influence these productivity gains. The work not only offers us a much more hopeful view of the world, but also brings specific guidelines to the other developing countries. It contributes to the scholarly growth studies as well. In the present economy, ecosystems of cooperating firms organizing themselves into supply webs bring us complex products, often packaging together goods and services. These firm networks also incur cybersecurity risks stemming from the interdependence of their Internet-based interorganizational IS. Thus, firms lose control of their information security postures. The measures taken by a firm's partners can bear weighty negative or positive externalities. How should the firms manage such risks of interdependence? In a formal economic analysis, Xia Zhao, Ling Xue, and Andrew B. Whinston show the relative effectiveness of three solutions to the problem: cyberinsurance, risk pooling, and outsourced managed security services, deployed in various combinations. The work has immediate practical implications and will certainly be built upon in a further development of the theoretical base of incentive-compatible cybersecurity measures. Online whistle-blowing systems have emerged as an apt medium for reporting organizational abuses and failures. It is important to ensure that these systems indeed facilitate the actual reporting. Paul Benjamin Lowry, Gregory D. Moody, Dennis F. Galletta, and Anthony Vance study the perceptual factors that can lead a firm's employees to engage in whistle-blowing with the use of these systems. This is certainly a case that if they build it, no one may show up. Beyond its immediate objective, the study also contributes to our understanding of the complexities of trust and anonymity. Two subsequent papers investigate aspects of IS development (ISD). In the recognition of the frequent failure of ISD projects, Ravi Narayanaswamy, Varun Grover, and Raymond M. Henry study the factors that inhibit harmony between the project participants, working under many pressures, notably those of uncertainty engendered by changing system requirements. The authors construct and test a model of congruence between the perceptions of the project manager and those of the team members. In seeking common understanding through a variety of influence tactics surfaced by the authors, the loss of project control can be averted. Mark Keith, Haluk Demirkan, and Michael Goul present a service-oriented methodology of ISD as well as a multiyear study of its deployment in the field. The methodology has its theoretical underpinnings in the coordination theory and is a contribution to both ISD and service science. The methodology is devised in the recognition of the fact that most ISD environments fall between the poles of stability and riskiness. Echoing the concerns and the solutions of the preceding paper, this work addresses the realities of the human processes surrounding the development of IT-based systems. Co-creation of value by consumers and other nonemployees has been increasingly a factor in the success of many a firm, and communities are most frequently the locus of this co-creation, with much of the individual motivation emerging from their collectives. In the first of the two papers investigating this domain, Constance Elise Porter, Sarv Devaraj, and Daewon Sun compare the results obtained in sponsored and in autonomous co-creation. In other words, should a firm sponsor a customer community or should it let the customers develop their own communities, if they wish to do so? The authors devise theory-driven models of both types of communities and test their hypotheses by surveying consumers involved in numerous communities. Although value is co-created in both community types, sponsored co-creation is found to offer advantages. Product reviews are one of the common outcomes of co-creation, subject to aggregation and becoming the electronic word-of-mouth. How credible are they in the perception of their readers? Matthew L. Jensen, Joshua M. Averbeck, Zhu Zhang, and Kevin B. Wright extend the language expectancy theory to the online setting in order to study how reader-expectancy violations result in greater or lower review credibility. In a nuanced discussion of their empirical findings, the authors highlight how reviews by strangers can exert-deserved or undeserved-influence on our behavior. Digital supply chains and webs are the reality of today's global business. In this environment, various categories of risk emerge. How can these risks be mitigated? Ling Xue, Cheng Zhang, Hong Ling, and Xia Zhao draw on the systems and organizational theories to propose and test their hypotheses that relate the extent of supply-chain digitization by companies to the modularity of their IS and to the allocation of the decision rights to the firm's IS unit. It emerges that the modularization has to be properly harmonized with the IS governance in seeking risk mitigation. Our anniversary is an occasion for the expression of gratitude. Profound thanks go to the IS community for the support JMIS has received over its first three decades. Thanks go to the present and past members of our Editorial Board, who have always been the thought leaders in our field. Thanks also go to our publisher, M.E. Sharpe, and to the editorial and technical team they have provided for us: they have been with us and for us for thirty years. Great thanks go to our referees-all of them, as I do not tire of saying-the primary guarantors of our quality. Here are the names of the JMIS referees: Hyung Jun Ahn Pervaiz Alam Hossam Ali-Hassan Muhammad Aljukhadar Gove Allen Omar Alnuaimi Paul Alpar Kemal Altinkemer Naveen Amblee Hayward P. Andres Corey Angst Ofer Arazy Kursad Asdemir Norman Au Yoris Au Benoit A. Aubert Peter van Baalen Barbro Back Hyunmi Baek Ainsworth Bailey Akhilesh Bajaj Hillol Bala Dirk Baldwin Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay Gaurav Bansal Ravi Bapna Indranil R. Bardhan Reza Barkhi Henri Barki Stuart J. Barnes Richard Baskerville Dinesh Batra David Bell Skip Benamati Michel Benaroch Raquel Benbunan-Fich Alexander Benlian François Bergeron Ganesh Bhatt Anol Bhattacherjee Sudip Bhattacharjee Jesse Bockstedt Wai Fong Boh Antal van den Bosch Indranil Bose Nicola Breugst Glenn J. Browne Sebastian Bruque Scott Buffett Judee Burgoon Andrew Burton-Jones Ashley Bush Terry A. Byrd Jinwei Cao Erran Carmel Sangmi Chai Susy Chan Hsin-Lu Chang Mohamed-Hédi Charki Michael Chau Patrick Chau Ramnath K. Chellappa Andrew Chen Daniel Chen Hong-Mei Chen Hsinchun Chen Jianqing Chen Jin Chen Kay-Yut Chen Kuan Chen Li Chen Liwei Chen Yan Chen Yuanyuan Chen Hsing Kenneth Cheng Mike Cheung Lei Chi Robert T.H. Chi Roger Chiang Benjamin Chiao Ananth Chiravuri Alina M. Chircu Chaochang Chiu Jong-min Choe H. Michael Chung Wingyan Chung Theodore H. Clark Randolph Cooper Kevin Crowston Dianne Cyr Qizhi Dai Yan Dang John D'Arcy Ronald Dattero Gregory Dawson Sergio De Cesare Jason Dedrick Chrysanthos Dellarocas Didem Demirhan Xuefei Deng Sarv Devaraj Soussan Djamasbi Su Dong Wenjing Duan Peter Duchessi Deborah E. Dunkle Alexandra Durcikova Kaushik Dutta Robert Easley Dana Edberg Christophe Elie-Dit-Cosaque Aaron Elkins Omar A. El Sawy Mike Eom Sean B. Eom J. Alberto Espinosa Andrea Everard Ming Fan Patrick Fan Xiaofen Fang Yulin Fang Steven Feiner Jane Feng Daniel R. Fesenmaier Eliezer M. Fich Robert Fichman Jerry Fjermestad Chris Forman Chiara Francalanci Brent Furneaux John Gallaugher Dale Ganley Gordon Gao Ina Garnefeld Edward J. Garrity Andrew Gemino Michiel van Genuchten Joey George Anindya Ghose Janis L. Gogan Kim Huat Goh Thomas Goh Dale Goodhue Anand Gopal Ram D. Gopal Nelson Granados Dawn G. Gregg Ulrike Gretzel Robert K. Griffin Michael D. Grigoriades Bin Gu Kemal Guler Ken Guo Zhiling Guo Saurabh Gupta Nicole Haggerty Jungpil Hahn Ingoo Han Kunsoo Han Khaled Hassenein Jun He Hemantha Herath Tejaswini Herath Traci Hess Alan R. Hevner Starr Roxanne Hiltz Oliver Hinz Richard Hoffman Jason Hong Weiyin Hong John A. Hoxmeier Pei-fang Hsu Jeffrey Hu Nan Hu Paul Hu Qing Hu Chun-Yao Huang Ming-Hui Huang Wayne Huang Kai Lung Hui Wendy Hui Ard Huizing Yujong Hwang Ghiyong Im Gretchen I. Irwin Anja Ischebeck Varghese Jacob Bharat A. Jain Radhika Jain Jeevan Jaisingh Dietmar Jannach Matthew Jensen Anand Jeyaraj Bao-Jun Jiang James J. Jiang Zhengrui Jiang Alice Johnson Eric Johnson Emmanuel Josserand Surinder Kahai Arnold Kamis Atreyi Kankanhalli Karthik Kannan P.K. Kannan Jahangir Karimi Evangelos Katsamakas Michael Kattan Timothy Kayworth Weiling Ke William J. Kettinger Moutaz Khouja Melody Y. Kiang Sia Siew Kien Byung Cho Kim Dan J. Kim Dongmin Kim Gimun Kim Seung Hyun Kim Young-Gul Kim Ruth King Rajiv Kishore Gary Klein Richard Klein Cenk Kocas Chang Koh Rajiv Kohli Tobias Kollman Sherrie Komiak Praveen K. Kopalle Marios Koufaris Kenneth A. Kozar Ramayya Krishnan Gillian Ku Uday Kulkarni Akhil Kumar Ram Kumar Jason Kuruzovich Atanu Lahiri Simon S.K. Lam Guido Lang Karl R. Lang Nancy Lankton Kai R. Larsen Gwanhoo Lee Heeseok Lee Ho Geun Lee Jong Seok Lee Jungwoo Lee Thomas Lee Yang Lee Yen-Hsien Lee Younghwa (Gabe) Lee Pierre-Majorique Léger Jan Marco Leimeister Natalia Levina Chen Li Dahui Li Ting Li Xiaotong Li Xin Li XinXin Li XiXi Li Ting-Peng Liang Paul Licker John Lim Fu-ren Lin Lihui Lin Ming Lin Yihwa Irene Liou Ying Liu Yipeng Liu Alexandre Lopes Paul B. Lowry Henry C. Lucas Jr. Mark Lycett Jane M. Mackay Pruthikrai Mahatanankoon M. Adam Mahmood Bin Mai Yogesh Malhotra Michael V. Mannino Ravi Mantena Ji-Ye Mao Salvatore T. March Kent Marett Likoebe M. Maruping Jerrold H. May William McCarthy Kristina McElheran Roy McKelvey Harrison McKnight Ephraim R. McLean Nirup Menon Randy Minas Shaila Miranda Dinesh Mirchandani Abhay Nath Mishra Sunil Mithas Prasenjit Mitra William Money Ali R. Montazemi Ramiro Montealegre Alan Montgomery Jolene Morrison Benjamin Mueller Michael D. Myers Peter P. Mykytyn Jr. Barin N. Nag Fiona Nah Derek Nazareth Matthew Nelson R. Ryan Nelson Boon Siong Neo Derrick Neufeld Michael Newman Andreas I. Nicolaou Ralitza Nikolaeva Mark Nissen Dmitri Nizovtsev Oded Nov Lih-Bin Oh Wonseok Oh Bob O'Keefe Lorne Olfman James Oliver Benoit Otjacques Peter Otto Yasin Ozcelik Zafer D. Ozdemir Carl Pacini Raymond R. Panko Gautam Pant Manoj Parameswaran Michael Parent Insu Park Sungjune Park Craig Parker Bhavik K. Pathak Praveen Pathak Ravi Patnayakuni Souren Paul David J. Pauleen Paul A. Pavlou Kenneth Peffers Robin Pennington Stacie C. Petter Roger A. Pick Selwyn Piramuthu Huseyin Polat Jean-Charles Pomerol Jaana Porra Gerald Post John H. Prager David Preston Lingyun Qiu Wen Guang Qu Arik Ragowsky Rex Kelly Rainer Jr. Vandana Ramachandran K. Ramamurthy Arkalgud Ramaprasad B. Ramesh Richard G. Ramirez H.R. Rao R. Ravichandran Gautam Ray Louis Raymond Blaize Horner Reich Bruce Reinig Yuqing Ren Paul Resnick Hyuen-Suk Rhee William B. Richmond Christoph Riedl René Riedl Lionel Robert Nicholas Roberts Daniel Robey Michael Rogich Nicholas C. Romano Jr. Huaxia Rui Sherry D. Ryan Young U. Ryu Khawaja Saeed Otavio Sanchez G. Lawrence Sanders Radhika Santhanam Pallab Sanyal Nilesh Saraf Saonee Sarker Surendra Sarnikar Pallab Sanyal Carol Saunders George Schell Hans J. Scholl Petra Schubert Judy Scott Ravi Sen Sagnika Sen Sylvain Sénécal Nainika Seth Vikram Sethi Theresa M. Shaft Michael Shaw Jim Sheffield Hong Sheng Morgan M. Shepherd Michael Shields Choon Ling Sia Siew Kien Sia Keng Siau Mark Silver Param Vir Singh Atish P. Sinha Sumit Sircar Stefan Smolnik Jaeki Song Ryan Sougstad Scott Spangler William E. Spangler Rajendra P. Srivastava Shirish C. Srivastava Thomas F. Stafford Eric W. Stein Dick Stenmark Theofanis C. Stratopoulos Diane M. Strong Besiki Stvilia Mani Subramani Chandra Subramaniam Ramanath Subramanyam Heshan Sun Arun Sundararajan Shankar Sundaresan Tae Kyung Sung Ali Tafti Paul P. Tallon Prasanna Tambe Vaughn Tan Yao-Hua Tan Qiuan Tang Xinlin Tang Mohan R. Tanniru Monideepa Tarafdar Nolan Taylor Gary F. Templeton Hock Hai Teo Thompson Teo Jason B. Thatcher Matthew Thatcher Dominic Thomas Ron Thompson James Y.L. Thong Gregory E. Truman Yanbin Tu Ilkka Tuomi Ofir Turel Tuure Tuunanen N.S. Umanath Andrew Urbaczewski Rustam Vahidov Ganesan Vaidyanathan Anthony Vance Viswanath Venkatesh Goetz Viering Padmal Vitharana Radu Vlas Douglas Vogel Steven Walczak Zhiping Walter Bin Wang Eric T.G. Wang Jingguo Wang Michael S. Wang Qiu-Hong Wang Shouhong Wang Sophia Wang Weiquan Wang Yinglei Wang Y. Richard Wang Molly Wasko Mary Beth Watson-Manheim Sunil Wattal Thomas Weber Chih-Ping Wei Bruce Weinberg Charles E. Wells John Wells Larry West J. Christopher Westland Jonathan Whitaker Michael E. Whitman Jeffrey L. Whitten George Widmeyer Rolf Wigand Fons Wijnhoven Christopher Wolfe Christina Wong Charles A. Wood Hans Wortmann Ryan Wright Dazhong Wu Mu Xia Weidong Xia Mingdi Xin Heng Xu Hongjiang Xu Lizhen Xu Peng Xu Yunjie (Calvin) Xu Ling Xue Yinping Yang Zhiyong Yang Oliver Yao Ulku Yaylacicegi Byungjoon Yoo Yufei Yuan Wei T. Yue Fatemeh Zahedi Chun Zeng Dongsong Zhang Han Zhang Jennifer Zhang John Zhang Michael Zhang Ping Zhang Xiaoquan Zhang Yulei Zhang Zuopeng Zhang Huimin Zhao J. Leon Zhao Kexin Zhao Dmitry Zhdanov Lina Zhou Yilu Zhou Zhongyun Zhou Hongwei Zhu Youlong Zhuang J. Christopher Zimmer Moshe Zviran At this time, we want remember two individuals who have contributed greatly to our field and who have also contributed to JMIS. Douglas C. Englebart, one of JMIS?'s authors, is, of course, much more famous as the inventor of the computer mouse. He was far more than that. A visionary, he saw the future computing environment already six decades ago as an augmentation of human intellect and as a vast medium of human collaboration. A practitioner, he implemented, against the great odds set by the early computing ecosystem, some of what he envisioned. Combining the insight and experience of several leading researchers, the programmatic paper Douglas Englebart coauthored in JMIS (vol. 18, no. 4, spring 2002) lays out the architectural principles of a system of knowledge evolution to support virtual communities. We all live in his world. Robert W. Blanning served for many years on the Editorial Board of JMIS. His work in the areas of decision support and in model management in particular is foundational and well known. As one of our editors, he has contributed to the final shape of papers in his domain that have appeared in the Journal. Our field, and our journal, will miss Bob Blanning. And now-on to the fourth decade of JMIS. Please read the papers. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2012)
Creating value with information is the objective of people supported by information technology, with the role of technology expanding apace. This is the essential point made by this Special Section, which bears that very title. Its Guest Editors, Robert O. Briggs and Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., have assembled a set of papers researching various aspects of this nodal issue in a variety of settings, with some of the works focusing on the human side of the equation and others on the technological support. The Guest Editors will introduce the papers to you. The methodological richness of the works and their collective contribution once again underscore the fact that the field of information systems (IS) is a full-fledged contributor in the family of scholarly disciplines. The first paper of the general section, by Gediminas Adomavicius, Alok Gupta, and Pallab Sanyal, addresses reverse online auctions. More specifically, these authors study multiattribute procurement auctions where the goods and services can be acquired from multiple suppliers. In going beyond the price discovery, these auctions allow the firm to acquire products with the desired attribute bundle. During an auction’s iterations, suppliers receive feedback that increasingly reveals buyer’s preferences. This feedback is a concession from the buyer’s point of view, necessary to populate the auction with suppliers. The authors use a laboratory experiment to study the effects of different feedback regimes on the outcomes of these complex auctions. This contribution to our knowledge about online auction markets is both generative of future scholarship and of practical importance in its recommendations for mechanism design. We expect advanced IS, when properly combined with other resources, to support the owner firm’s search for competitive advantage. The authors of the next paper, Nicholas Roberts and Varun Grover, empirically study how positive competitive effects can be achieved in the area of customer-oriented agility, a dynamic capability to sense and respond to the opportunities generated by individual customers. Co-creating with customers in the processes of open innovation is just one, and important, example of deploying such a capability. The authors develop and validate a model of customer-oriented agility that combines the factors leading to the sensing ability (such as integrated customer touch points on the Web, and the ability to analyze the data and consumer articulations) with the prerequisites of the responding ability (predicated on the coordination of organizational action). Two further papers in the issue study software maintenance, a sorely understudied subject in our field, even though maintenance actually absorbs most of the corporate software resources. Dana Edberg, Polina Ivanova, and William Kuechler use the precepts of grounded theory to explore how IS professionals come up with the maintenance methodology they use. The authors find that bricolage is employed: components of various maintenance methodologies are identified for the purpose, and mashed together. Thus, the components of both life cycle–oriented and rapid prototyping methodologies are combined. Based on this finding, the authors present a model describing the factors leading to the choice of these components. These findings, it is to be hoped, will stimulate further work to enhance the actual maintenance practice and leaven the development of the theory of software maintenance. It is time we, as a field, contributed more to the practice of software maintenance. A different aspect of maintenance is software patching by vendors in response to the identified vulnerabilities to security breaches. Considering the potential consequences of the use of unpatched software, the patch-release behavior of the vendors is of great moment to the secure operation of organizational systems and, indeed, to the national infrastructure. The authors, Orcun Temizkan, Ram L. Kumar, SungJune Park, and Chandrasekar Subramaniam, decompose security into its key aspects to develop and test a model of software vendor behavior in patching. They find that the vendor reaction in the face of different vulnerabilities and in various software market structures displays vital differences. The desirability of these differences is questionable in various circumstances. Policy implications follow. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1991)
An introduction to several articles published within the June 1991 issue of "Journal of Management Information Systems," is presented. Articles discussed include "Delegation Technologies: Environmental Scanning with Intelligent Agents," by Gregg Elofson and Benn Konsynski, "Testing a Causal Model of End-User Application Effectiveness," by Donald Amoroso and Paul Cheney, and "The Implications of Declining Enrollments in Undergraduate CIS Programs in the United States," by Edward G. Cale, Jr., Charles H. Mawhinney, and David R. Callaghan.

Special Section: Information Systems in Competitive Strategies: Offshoring, Risk Management, Strategic Pricing, E-Sourcing, and Standards - Kauffman, Robert J; Clemons, Eric K; Dewan, Rajiv M (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2005)
Special Section: Information Systems in Competitive Strategies: Offshoring, Risk Management, Strategic Pricing, E-Sourcing, and Standards Robert J. Kauffman, Eric K. Clemons, and Rajiv M. Dewan Robert J. Kauffman is the Director of the MIS Research Center, and Professor and Chair in the Information Decision Sciences Department at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. He holds a B.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder (1977), and an M.A. from Cornell University (1979). He is also an M.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1988) graduate of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (now the Tepper School of Business), Carnegie Mellon University, and served on the faculty of the Stern School of Business at New York University (1988–1994) and the Simon Graduate School of Business at University of Rochester (1993). His industry experience is in international banking and global finance, and financial services consulting. His research focuses on senior management issues in organizational strategy with technology, IT value, technology infrastructure investments and adoption, pricing strategies in e-commerce, and supply-chain management and electronic procurement markets. His research also won best paper awards over the years at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (WITS), and Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), and twice at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) and Institute for Operations Research and the Management Systems (INFORMS) Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST). His work with Sudipto Banerjee and Bin Wang on Bayesian analysis of Internet firm survival won top research honors at the International Conference on Electronic Commerce in Xi’an, China, in August 2005. He also chaired the Workshop on IS and Economics (WISE) at New York University (1991) and the Georgia Institute of Technology (1996), and INFORMS CIST in Denver, Colorado (2004). Eric K. Clemons is a Professor of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has an S.B. in Physics from MIT and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University. He has been a pioneer in the systematic study of the transformational effects of information on the strategy and practice of business. His research and teaching interests include strategic uses of information systems, information economics, and the effect of information technology on the risks and benefits of outsourcing and strategic alliances. Industries of focus include international securities markets and financial services firms, consumer packaged goods retailing, and travel. Dr. Clemons is the founder and Project Director for the Reginald H. Jones Center’s Sponsored Research Project on Information: Strategy and Economics, founder and area coordinator of the School’s new major in Information: Strategy, and Economics, director of the School’s new eCommerce major and member of the Wharton eBusiness Initiative Curriculum Oversight Committee, an active participant in the School’s eCommerce Forum research program, and member of the Faculty Council of the SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management. Dr. Clemons has 28 years experience on the faculties of Wharton, Cornell, and Harvard, and consulting experience in the private and public sectors both domestically and abroad. Rajiv M. Dewan is an Associate Professor of Computers and Information Systems at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester, where he teaches courses on financial information systems and the economics of information management and e-commerce. His research interests include management of information systems in organizations, markets for information goods and services, and the economics of electronic commerce. His research has appeared in Management Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Computers, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, INFORMS Journal of Computing, and other journals. He has won best paper awards at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (1998 and 2002), and at the International Conference on Information Systems (1995). He cochaired the Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE) in Seattle, Washington, in December 2003. Leading researchers in the field of information systems (IS) focus on the pursuit of new knowledge that will help us to understand the leading problems involving information technology (IT) with respect to decision making, products, business processes, firms, markets, and the global economy. This annual Special Section in the Journal of Management Information Systems, representing the recurring theme of “competitive strategy, economics, and IS,” has become a showcase for new thinking with respect to economic theory, analytical modeling, and econometric methods in IS research. This year—if we gauge by the contents of the Special Section—is no different. The topics that are discussed in the papers in this Special Section are worthy of the attention of senior management and faculty researchers. The authors who are represented offer a range of innovative and intriguing theoretical perspectives. They provide an opportunity for the readers of this journal to seek new ways of approaching a number of highly relevant problems. In addition, the evidence that the authors provide via their modeling and empirical results, and simulation and case study results, reveals many rich and new managerial insights that will be useful in the study of competitive strategy, economics, and IS. The Special Section opens with a paper by Amitava Dutta and Rahul Roy, entitled “Offshore Outsourcing: A Dynamic Causal Model of Counteracting Forces.” The authors apply the methodologies and analysis constructs of systems dynamics as a means to examine the interaction among factors that have been driving the growth in offshore outsourcing. They argue that the recent upsurge in demand for offshoring services should be understood in the larger context of the international mobility of software labor and its changing local costs, and other elements of free markets and the global economy. Dutta and Roy also argue that IT is an important facilitator of offshoring. They develop a two-country causal model for IT offshoring that permits computational exploration of the key interacting variables and provides the capability to assess changes in offshoring services demand and supply as the underlying factor price of labor changes. The authors’ use of systems dynamics methods permits them to provide unique conceptual and evaluative representations of the changing parameters of the drivers of offshoring services demand and supply. The results of this research are developed through the authors’ use of computational experiments, which, in this context, involves the parameterizations of dynamic models that show the adjustment in factor wages associated with IT labor, while simultaneously considering the growth in the offshoring labor pool, the growth of training services to enhance the capabilities of labor, and the inflow of capital in support of the growth of the sector. The authors provide a unique contribution in their conceptualization of the interconnectedness of key drivers of offshoring in the global IS business context. Ravi Aron, Eric K. Clemons, and Sashi Reddi next investigate the topic of “Just Right Outsourcing: Understanding and Managing Risk.” They identify the critical importance associated with a variety of kinds of strategic risk that affect the willingness of senior management to effectively develop outsourcing and offshoring contracts. The authors especially point to the role of the opportunistic behavior of suppliers of outsourcing services. They identify the critical importance of agency problems and shirking in outsourcing contracts, the poaching and misuse of contractually supplied information, and unilateral changes in the terms of a previously agreed-upon contract. The latter is alternately known as opportunistic renegotiation, post-contractual small-numbers bargaining, or simply vendor holdup. The authors offer a number of prescriptions to help senior managers redesign their business process outsourcing activities to mitigate the risks their firms will face. They also provide a framework with a series of analysis steps: the identification of the affected tasks, the means to assess the strategic and operational risks that are involved, and the redesign of business process outsourcing activities through a project management approach called strategic chunkification. This is “dividing any process into separate component activities, or chunks that can be outsourced, and that can be outsourced in a manner that reduces the risk relative to that of outsourcing the entire original process.” The authors further distinguish between vertical chunkification, which is dividing business process outsourcing into sequential nonoverlapping activities, and horizontal chunkification, which involves dividing the volume of a process or a set of subtasks among alternative vendors. They apply their conceptual approach in the context of a bank whose senior management wishes to outsource a mission-critical business process. Through detailed consideration of the various activities and risks that arise, the authors offer a number of potentially useful strategies for mitigating the strategic risks. The middle three articles in the Special Section deal with strategic pricing in electronic commerce. They provide coverage of price rigidity and price flexibility in e-bookselling, pricing strategies for new and used bookselling in the presence of electronic secondary markets on the Internet, and the digital content distribution pricing for client–server and peer-to-peer (P2P) network distribution. In “Beyond the Hype of Frictionless Markets: Evidence of Heterogeneity in Price Rigidity on the Internet,” Mark E. Bergen, Robert J. Kauffman, and Dongwon Lee present an empirical case study that investigates empirical regularities in daily pricing patterns and price rigidity for Internet-based selling by the two major online booksellers, Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. Price rigidity occurs when retail and wholesale prices move less than might be expected, in view of the changing costs of the underlying commodities or input materials in manufacturing production, or when the level of interfirm competition suggests that heterogeneous firms might be able to effectively compete on price. The authors observed evidence of considerable daily price flexibility in the Internet-based sale of new books of various kinds, based on several million observations of book prices over a 449-day period in 2003 and 2004. They report, for example, that the leading e-booksellers appear to adjust prices flexibly on any day of the week. This is probably made possible by their reduced physical menu costs, or costs associated with price adjustment, which they face now that IT is at the heart of the production and dissemination of prices on the Internet. However, the authors also find contradictory evidence to suggest that there may be other drivers of price rigidity aside from menu costs. For example, they observed price changes for the e-booksellers with respect to specific books that occurred over a period of months—not days, as near-zero menu costs might suggest—and with substantial variations in price adjustment patterns across the two retailers and the different book categories. The authors propose a new variance theory of Internet-based price rigidity. They argue that the observed pricing patterns should be interpreted in terms of other theoretical considerations—such as characteristics of market demand, the nature of firm competition in the marketplace, the extent to which pricing choices convey information about the stores’ quality images, and so on. This research reflects the strong interdisciplinary nature of IS research on pricing that borrows ideas from marketing and economics. Anindya Ghose, Rahul Telang, and Ramayya Krishnan, in “The Effect of Electronic Secondary Markets on the Supply Chain,” develop, analyze, and test a theoretical model of how electronic primary markets for new goods and electronic secondary markets for used goods interact with one another and affect sellers’ optimal strategies for price setting and channel choice. A commonly held perspective is that markets for used goods negatively affect the ability of sellers of new goods to achieve the highest levels of profitability. The authors offer counterintuitive thinking in this respect. They argue that there are conditions under which the development of a parallel electronic market has a positive influence on new goods sellers’ ability to increase sales. The authors call this the market expansion effect, and they report that it is a countervailing influence to the cannibalization effect that arises due to the competition between new and used goods purchases. A key insight of this research is that the use of a secondary market e-channel permits the seller to practice quality-based price discrimination without having to bear the typical costs associated with achieving effective market segmentation for quality. In addition, the authors explore the possibility that new goods prices are lower in the presence of an electronic market for used goods, and how used goods sales commission fees that are levied by a secondary electronic market intermediary affect pricing, and influence both the new and used goods markets. The authors analyzed data from Amazon.com, which sells new and used books of the same titles via its Web site. They show the tie between the used and new book markets online, in terms of the way that higher new book prices tend to drive used book prices higher, and that increasing availability of used books creates pressure to reduce new book prices. Karl Reiner Lang and Roumen Vragov are the authors of the fifth paper of the Special Section. They continue the theme of pricing, technology in markets, and Internet-based selling. Their study, “A Pricing Mechanism for Digital Content Distribution Over Computer Networks,” reveals an interesting strategic choice problem that occurs with distributors of digital content on the Internet, such as digital music, DVD movies, electronic books, and other entertainment industry-related products. In particular, the authors analyze two different strategic approaches that digital content providers can use to distribute their information goods: a client–server model and a P2P model. The client–server model involves the management and distribution of information from a central location, in which digital content and customer relationships are tightly controlled. The P2P model of content distribution involves much less control over the supply of digital content and over the distribution channels that are used. Digital content consumers participate directly in the distribution process. However, the beneficial trade-off comes with improved efficiency of distribution and service level capabilities that need not be matched by central infrastructure capacity. The authors develop a monopolistic pricing mechanism that compensates P2P users who play an active role in content distribution. They show the benefits and incentives associated with P2P network distribution over client–server distribution by analyzing a modified growth theory model that is developed with application to generations of consumers and which provides a means to share revenues with peer user/distributors of digital content. The fifth paper of the Special Section asks an important question related to supply chain management: “Buyer’s Efficient E-Sourcing Structure: Centralize or Decentralize?” The authors, Rui Dai, Sridhar Narasimhan, and D.J. Wu, define e-sourcing as the use of business software to automate or augment key business processes related to procurement of supplies, including the identification and evaluation of procurement goods, the negotiation of the terms and conditions associated with purchasing, and the configuration of firm’s organizational structure for procurement, in view of the effective management of long-term supplier relationships. The authors develop and analyze an economic model that analyzes three critical success factors for e-sourcing. They include the communication complexity among interorganizational procurement partners, the frequency of use of the technology-based solution for procurement, and the unit cost of delay for the supply chain in the presence of the technology-based solution. The authors present modeling results for different levels of communication complexity, which emphasize different optimal choices for e-sourcing structure. For example, when communication complexity is high, the unambiguously appropriate choice for the firm is to decentralize procurement. When the opposite is true, and communication complexity is low, the firm should centralize e-sourcing. It turns out that in the intermediate cases—when communication complexity is medium high or lower—frequency of use is the controlling factor. With higher frequency of use, according to the authors, the appropriate decision is to tend toward greater decentralization of e-sourcing activities. The authors offer several mini-case analyses with numerical simulations of the effects of the different e-sourcing structures for firms that exhibit different communication complexity and frequency-of-use levels. They also extend the managerial intuition offered in their analysis by examining situations involving demand shocks and spikes, and servicing trade-offs in the presence of spillover of procurement requests across decentralized e-sourcing units of the firm. This kind of research is outstanding in terms of helping to structure senior managers’ thinking about the organization and governance of supply-chain and procurement activities. The final paper in the Special Section is “Information Technology Standards Choices and Industry Structure Outcomes: The Case of the U.S. Home Mortgage Industry,” by Rolf T. Wigand, Charles W. Steinfield, and M. Lynne Markus. The authors offer a careful examination of the mortgage industry in the United States and the extent to which new IS standards are driving industry transformation. The authors discuss the role of XML-based standards in general terms across a variety of industries. They also make the case for vertical IS standards, which consist of data structures and data definitions, document formats, and business processes-related technical standards that apply in specific industry contexts. The authors argue that the changes in costs and accessibility associated with XML-based standards are likely to lead to significant changes in the mortgage industry. They also note, however, that the specific outcomes that are likely to be observed in the market are contingent upon the industry’s main players’ strategies and their success with implementation, in terms of operating-cost reductions and productivity improvements. The authors’ theory-building research offers a highly revealing “insider’s view” of the mortgage industry based on a longitudinal field study, case study interviews, and extensive analysis of prior literature. They leverage their main results to predict that the mortgage industry is unlikely to experience consolidation for primarily technology-driven reasons. Instead, they forecast that the benefits of XML-based standards will be available to be appropriated by a range of industry players, including small and medium-sized firms, which will also be able to successfully invest in them. This is the second year that the Journal of Management Information Systems is publishing an expanded issue including papers devoted to new research on competitive strategy, economics, and information systems. The Guest Editors thank the Editor-in-Chief, Vladimir Zwass, who continues to make this opportunity available to us. We would be remiss if we did not thank our faculty, industry, and doctoral program colleagues. The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) and JMIS reviewers were enormously helpful with content-related suggestions that helped influence our authors’ thinking. These people were kind enough to assist us with up to three rounds of reviews on the Special Sections’ papers, resulting in their high quality. Finally, we thank Dongwon Lee and Donna Sarppo at the MIS Research Center, University of Minnesota, for helping out with disseminating review requests, reminding reviewers about the due dates of their reviews, and generally keeping this entire enterprise on track. We simply would not have been able to finish this Special Section without their outstanding assistance.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2010)
J        M       ̷ 9;I        S The Special Section that opens this twenty-seventh volume of the Journal is devoted to the social aspects of information systems and of the larger systems they serve. Although the social aspects cannot be neatly isolated from the technological ones for the purpose of a study in a natural setting (the systems principle in action), social factors define the success and failure in the settings analyzed here. Ideation, complex decision making, collaboration models, around-the-clock software development, development of information-based strategy, technology-supported teamwork, intraorganizational blogging, and software licensing are the phenomena under study in this issue’s papers. They are highly salient to the present and future deployment of organizational information systems. The Guest Editors, Robert O. Briggs, Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., and Ralph H. Sprague, introduce the papers. The first paper in the general section, authored by Daniel Q. Chen, David S. Preston, and Weidong Xia, reports an empirical study of the changing role of the chief information officer (CIO). With information technology (IT) becoming commoditized at the infrastructural levels of the stack, and with outsourcing, cloud computing, and service-oriented architectures moving much of the provision to specialist firms, albeit at the same time as IT is becoming a weighty determinant of corporate capabilities, the CIO is expected to act as a partner in strategy forming to other C‑level executives. The researchers offer and validate a staged maturity model of the CIO transition from the supply-side, operationally oriented leadership role to the demand-side role, with the responsibilities for the strategic deployment of organizational IT. The model will serve future researchers of the new CIO roles. Organizations will be able to employ the transition factors identified in this work in their assessment of CIO role fulfillment. The concluding paper in the issue, by Ryan T. Wright and Kent Marett, investigates an all-too-familiar side of computing: phishing. The staggering figure cited by the authors as resulting from phishing damages just in the United States motivates the authors to investigate the factors that condition the susceptibility of the deceived. The authors offer suggestions, based on their validated model, for the designers of antiphishing and other software mediating users’ access to the messages and for user education aimed at modifying their behavior. It is the tradition and my distinct privilege to acknowledge at the start of a new JMIS volume the contribution of our referees, the primary guarantors of the Journal ’s quality. Thanks go to: Niv Ahituv Hyung Jun Ahn Pervaiz Alam Gove Allen Omar Alnuaimi Paul Alpar Kemal Altinkemer Naveen Amblee Hayward P. Andres Corey Angst Kursad Asdemir Norman Au Yoris Au Benoit A. Aubert Peter van Baalen Barbro Back Akhilesh Bajaj Dirk Baldwin Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay Ravi Bapna Indranil R. Bardhan Reza Barkhi Henri Barki Stuart J. Barnes Anitesh Barua Richard Baskerville Geneviève Bassellier Dinesh Batra Skip Benamati Michel Benaroch Raquel Benbunan-Fich François Bergeron Ganesh Bhatt Anol Bhattacherjee Jesse Bockstedt Wai Fong Boh Indranil Bose Robert P. Bostrom Nicola Breugst Glenn J. Browne Sebastian Bruque Scott Buffett Judee Burgoon Andrew Burton-Jones Ashley Bush Brian Butler Terry A. Byrd Engin Cakici Jinwei Cao Sven Carlsson William J. Carroll Huseyin Cavusoglu Susy Chan Yolande E. Chan Hsin-Lu Chang Jerry Cha-Jan Chang Mohamed Hédi Charki Patrick Chau Ramnath K. Chellappa Daniel Chen Hong-Mei Chen Hsinchun Chen Kay-Yut Chen Kuan Chen Yuanyuan Chen Hsing Kenneth Cheng Lei Chi Robert T.H. Chi Roger Chiang Benjamin Chiao Alina M. Chircu Jong-min Choe H. Michael Chung Wingyan Chung Theodore H. Clark Randolph Cooper Kevin Crowston Dianne Cyr Qizhi Dai Ronald Dattero Sergio De Cesare Jason Dedrick Didem Demirhan Sarv Devaraj Rajiv M. Dewan Debabrata Dey Tamara Dinev Wenjing Duan Peter Duchessi Deborah E. Dunkle Alexandra Durcikova Kaushik Dutta Robert Easley Christophe Elie-Dit-Cosaque Omar A. El Sawy Sean B. Eom Tae-In Eom J. Alberto Espinosa Ming Fan Patrick Fan Xiaofen Fang Yulin Fang Steven Feiner Jane Feng Daniel R. Fesenmaier Eliezer M. Fich Edmond P. Fitzgerald Jerry Fjermestad Chris Forman Chiara Francalanci Mark Fuller Brent Furneaux John Gallaugher Dennis Galletta Dale Ganley Gordon Gao Edward J. Garrity Judith Gebauer Andrew Gemino Michiel van Genuchten Joey George Anindya Ghose Janis L. Gogan Kim Huat Goh Thomas Goh Jahyun Goo Dale Goodhue Anand Gopal Ram D. Gopal Nelson Granados Peter Gray Dawn G. Gregg Ulrike Gretzel Robert K. Griffin Michael D. Grigoriades Bin Gu Kemal Guler Zhiling Guo Saurabh Gupta Jungpil Hahn Barbara Haley James A. Hall Ingoo Han Kunsoo Han Paul Hart Matthias Häsel Khaled Hassenein Stephen Hayne Jun He Terrence Hendershott Traci Hess Alan R. Hevner Starr Roxanne Hiltz Richard Hoffman John A. Hoxmeier Pei-fang Hsu Jeffrey Hu Paul Hu Ming-Hui Huang Wayne Huang Kai Lung Hui Wendy Hui Ard Huizing Yujong Hwang Ghiyong Im Gretchen I. Irwin Bala Iyer Varghese Jacob Bharat A. Jain Matthew Jensen Bao-Jun Jiang James J. Jiang Zhengrui Jiang Alice Johnson Linda Ellis Johnson Joni Jones Emmanuel Josserand Surinder Kahai Ajit Kambil Arnold Kamis Keumseok Kang Atreyi Kankanhalli P.K. Kannan Jahangir Karimi Evangelos Katsamakas Michael Kattan Timothy Kayworth Grover Kearns William J. Kettinger Omar E.M. Khalil Moutaz Khouja Melody Y. Kiang Sia Siew Kien Dan J. Kim Dongmin Kim Ruth King Rajiv Kishore Gary Klein Richard Klein Dong-Gil Ko Cenk Kocas Chang Koh Rajiv Kohli Tobias Kollman Sherrie Komiak Praveen K. Kopalle Marios Koufaris Kenneth A. Kozar Ramayya Krishnan Uday Kulkarni Akhil Kumar Ram Kumar Jason Kuruzovich Atanu Lahiri Karim Lakhani Simon S.K. Lam Karl R. Lang Nancy Lankton Tor J. Larsen Raymond Lau Gwanhoo Lee Heeseok Lee Ho Geun Lee Jae-Nam Lee Jungwoo Lee Matthew Lee Thomas Lee Yang Lee Yen-Hsien Lee Christine Legner Jan Marco Leimeister Hugo Levecq Natalia Levina Chen Li Dahui Li Jiexun Li Na Li Ting Li Xiaotong Li Xin Li XinXin Li Ting-Peng Liang Paul Licker John Lim Fu-ren Lin Lihui Lin Ming Lin Yihwa Irene Liou Jacqueline Lipton Ying Liu Alexandre Lopes Paul B. Lowry Henry C. Lucas Jr. Mark Lycett Jane M. Mackay Simha R. Magal Pruthikrai Mahatanankoon M. Adam Mahmood Yogesh Malhotra Arti Mann Ji-Ye Mao Salvatore T. March Kent Marett Likoebe M. Maruping Nelson Massad Charles H. Mawhinney Jerrold H. May William McCarthy Roy McKelvey Harrison McKnight Ephraim R. McLean Nigel Melville Shaila Miranda Rajesh Mirani Dinesh Mirchandani Abhay Nath Mishra Sunil Mithas Prasenjit Mitra William Money Ali R. Montazemi Ramiro Montealegre Jolene Morrison Benjamin Mueller Michael D. Myers Peter P. Mykytyn Jr. Barin N. Nag Fiona Nah Derek Nazareth Matthew Nelson R. Ryan Nelson Boon Siong Neo Derrick Neufeld Michael Newman Ralitza Nikolaeva Mark Nissen Dmitri Nizovtsev Wonseok Oh Bob O’Keefe Lorne Olfman James Oliver Benoit Otjacques Peter Otto Yasin Ozcelik Zafer D. Ozdemir Carl Pacini Raymond R. Panko Manoj Parameswaran Michael Parent Sungjune Park Craig Parker Bhavik K. Pathak Ravi Patnayakuni Souren Paul David J. Pauleen Paul A. Pavlou Kenneth Peffers Robin Pennington Francis Pereira Roger A. Pick Selwyn Piramuthu Huseyin Polat Jean-Charles Pomerol Jaana Porra Gerald Post John H. Prager David Preston Sandeep Purao Lingyun Qiu Jim Quan Arik Ragowsky T.S. Ragu-Nathan Arun Rai Rex Kelly Rainer Jr. Vandana Ramachandran K. Ramamurthy Arkalgud Ramaprasad B. Ramesh Richard G. Ramirez C. Ranganathan H.R. Rao R. Ravichandran T. Ravichandran Sury Ravindran Gautam Ray Louis Raymond Blaize Horner Reich Yuqing Ren Paul Resnick Hyuen-Suk Rhee William B. Richmond Lionel Robert Daniel Robey Michael Rogich Nicholas C. Romano Jr. Sherry D. Ryan Young U. Ryu Khawaja Saeed Otavio Sanchez G. Lawrence Sanders Radhika Santhanam Pallab Sanyal Suprateek Sarker Surendra Sarnikar Carol Saunders Gregory Schechtman George Schell Petra Schubert Judy Scott Ravi Sen Sylvain Sénécal Kishore Sengupta Nainika Seth Vikram Sethi Theresa M. Shaft Michael Shaw Jim Sheffield Hong Sheng Morgan M. Shepherd Michael Shields Choon Ling Sia Siew Kien Sia Keng Siau Mark Silver Param Vir Singh Atish P. Sinha Sumit Sircar H. Jeff Smith Toni M. Somers Jai-Yeol Son Jaeki Song Ryan Sougstad Scott Spangler William E. Spangler Rajendra P. Srivastava Thomas F. Stafford Stephen Standifird Sandy Staples Eric W. Stein Dick Stenmark Diane M. Strong Besiki Stvilia Mani Subramani Girish Subramanian Ramesh Subramanian Ramanath Subramanyam Robert T. Sumichrast Shankar Sunarajan Arun Sundararajan Shankar Sundaresan Tae Kyung Sung Anjana Susarla Paul P. Tallon Vaughn Tan Yao-Hua Tan Xinlin Tang Mohan R. Tanniru Monideepa Tarafdar Nolan Taylor David P. Tegarden Gary F. Templeton James T.C. Teng Hock Hai Teo Thompson Teo Jason B. Thatcher Matthew Thatcher Dominic Thomas Ron Thompson James Y.L. Thong Amrit Tiwana Kerem Tomak Leon van der Torre Gregory E. Truman Yanbin Tu Lai Lai Tung Ilkka Tuomi Ofir Turel Tuure Tuunanen N.S. Umanath Andrew Urbaczewski Rustam Vahidov Anthony Vance Viswanath Venkatesh Goetz Viering Padmal Vitharana Douglas Vogel Roumen Vragov Steven Walczak Zhiping Walter Bin Wang Eric T.G. Wang Jingguo Wang Michael S. Wang Qiu-Hong Wang Shouhong Wang Sophia Wang Weiquan Wang Y. Richard Wang Molly Wasko Mary Beth Watson-Manheim Sunil Wattal Thomas Weber Chih-Ping Wei Charles E. Wells John Wells Larry West J. Christopher Westland Seungjin Whang Michael E. Whitman George Widmeyer Rolf Wigand Fons Wijnhoven Charles A. Wood Hans Wortmann Ryan Wright Dazhong Wu Harris Wu Mu Xia Weidong Xia Heng Xu Hongjiang Xu Peng Xu Christopher Yang Mun Yi Byungjoon Yoo Yufei Yuan Wei T. Yue Fatemeh Zahedi Dongsong Zhang Han Zhang Jennifer Zhang John Zhang Michael Zhang Ping Zhang Zhu Zhang Zuopeng Zhang Huimin Zhao J. Leon Zhao Kexin Zhao Dmitry Zhdanov Lina Zhou Yilu Zhou Zhongyun Zhou Hongwei Zhu Youlong Zhuang J. Christopher Zimmer Moshe Zviran I am pleased to welcome to the JMIS Editorial Board three new members: Dennis F. Galletta of the University of Pittsburgh, Amrit Tiwana of the University of Georgia, and Viswanath Venkatesh of the University of Arkansas. I also wish to acknowledge the contribution of the outgoing members of the Board, Michael J. Gallivan, William R. King, and Murray Turoff. Very special thanks go to Bill and Murray, for their long years of distinguished service to our Board---and to our field. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Special Section: Applying Information Economics to Corporate Strategy - Clemons, Eric K; Dewan, Rajiv M; Kauffman, Robert J (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2007)
Rajiv M. Dewan is an Associate Professor at the University of Rochester’s William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, where he is involved in research in electronic commerce, organizational issues in management and information systems, the information technology industry, and financial information systems. He currently serves as the chair of the schoolwide doctoral program. His papers have been published in Management Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, Information Systems Research, INFORMS Journal of Computing, Decision Support Systems, IEEE Transactions on Computers, and other journals. Prior to joining the Simon School, he was a faculty member at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE Computer Society, INFORMS, Association for Information Systems, and Beta Gamma Sigma. Dr. Dewan and two other colleagues from the University of Rochester won the "Best Paper" award in the Internet and Digital Economy Track at HICSS-35 in January 2002. He has been organizing HICSS mini-tracks on strategy, economics, IS, and e-commerce since 1999. Robert J. Kauffman is the W.P. Carey Chair in Information Systems at the W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. He previously worked in international banking, and served on the faculty of the University of Minnesota, New York University, and the University of Rochester. His graduate degrees are from Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on senior management issues in IS strategy and business value, IT investments and financial evaluation, technology adoption, e-commerce and e-markets, and supply-chain management. His research has been published in Organization Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Managerial Decisions and Economics, Information Systems Research, Decision Sciences, and other leading journals and conference proceedings. Dr. Kauffman won best research paper awards at INFORMS CIST in 2003, 2004, and 2005; HICSS in 2004; ICEC in 2005; and the Eighth Information Management Conference in Taiwan in 2006. He is also a 2006 recipient of the IEEE International Society for Engineering Management’s "Outstanding Research Contribution." This fall’s Special Section of the Journal of Management Information Systems explores the nexus of competitive strategy, economics, and information systems (IS). Seven papers are included that show the continuing interest of IS researchers in the digital economy, the business value of information technology (IT), and IT services outsourcing and services science. Moreover, the perspective of users is explored through papers on the role of trust in selecting an online seller and on the role of privacy concerns in selecting an online merchant. The papers were drawn from the mini-track on "Competitive Strategy, Economics, and Information Systems" and the related twentieth anniversary research symposium at the annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), held on the island of Hawaii in early January 2007. The papers were presented at HICSS 2007, and there received comments from the mini-track participants and coeditors. They have all been modified and expanded, based on comments from the mini-track and during the subsequent refereeing process for JMIS. The Special Section begins with a paper by Il-Horn Hann, Kai-Lung Hui, Sang-Yong Tom Lee, and Ivan P.L. Png, entitled "Overcoming Online Information Privacy Concerns: An Information-Processing Theory Approach." Information privacy on the Internet has reached a high level of personal concern for consumers and citizens, and has been receiving increasingly high corresponding degrees of interest from public policy makers and government officials. Today, the loss of control of social security numbers, financial accounts information, credit records, driver’s license information, and even house occupancy-related records make it increasing possibly for motivated individuals to create false identities that support crime, the theft of money and other personal assets, and other disconcerting actions. Businesses, in particular, may misuse and exploit information that they collect from the Internet. In this paper, the authors apply information-processing theory to support a greater understanding about the efficacy of what businesses can do to minimize the problems they face, in order to effectively obtain customer information, in the presence of customers’ concerns. Specifically, they explore the privacy policies firms offer related to the acquisition and use of personal information, and how they can share the benefits of such information with customers, by offering financial incentives and convenience. The central theoretical perspective of this work characterizes customers as having an understanding of the likely outcomes, so their willingness to share private and personal information will be conditioned by their knowledge and experience. The authors use experimental methods with U.S.- and Singapore-based subjects to explore their privacy concerns in the context of a research design that asked upper-division university students enrolled in e-commerce courses to rank 18 Web sites based on the information privacy concerns that arose. The authors manipulated the extent of the personal information requested by the experimental Web sites, the stimuli in their experiments. They report that firms that offer incomplete privacy protection and some benefits to consumers increase the motivation to share private information, especially financial incentives and convenience. Although the results of this research are experimental, and involve university students and mocked-up Web sites, we nevertheless felt that the importance of this work was such that it deserved our nomination for "best research paper" in the mini-track at HICSS 2007, and so we chose to position it as the lead-off paper of this Special Section. The second paper is a case study, addressing the role of trust in electronic markets and the role of information asymmetries in undermining trust. This case examines the limitations of eBay’s highly visible, highly flawed, consumer feedback rating system and the prospects for a business aimed specifically at addressing these limitations. Eric K. Clemons’s contribution to the Special Section is entitled "An Empirical Investigation of Third-Party Seller Rating Systems in E-Commerce: The Case of buySAFE." It provides a basis for ongoing theory development related to organizational strategies that recognize the importance of information asymmetries in the digital marketplace, but it also supports MBA and executive teaching. The paper’s theoretical perspective is founded on the Nobel Memorial Prize in economic sciences--winning analysis of markets in which the buyers’ information deficit reduces their individual willingness to pay for the goods and services that they would like to purchase. In extreme cases, the theory argues, the problems created by buyers’ information asymmetries can lead to market collapse. The case provides a detailed examination of buySAFE’s certification of eBay sellers. buySAFE’s business model involves bonding sellers’ transactions for as much as $25,000. This has a number of beneficial effects on the online auction process: it improves the information endowments of the buyers, it increases their willingness to pay for the goods and services offered, and it increases the margins and total revenues of the sellers. Clemons reports on the difficulties that the company has had with its business model and acceptance in the marketplace by examining the senior executives’ decisions to adjust their approach to the market and find a way to achieve higher profitability. Ashish Arora and Chris Forman are the authors of the third paper of this Special Section. Their contribution is "Proximity and Information Technology Outsourcing: How Local Are IT Services Markets?" Using a sample of nearly 100,000 firms in the United States from 2002 and 2004, the authors evaluate the supply and demand relationship for IT outsourcing services that are offered in regional locations of the firms. They focus on two kinds of services--programming services and design and hosting services. When these services are primarily offered locally to firms, the authors argue that increases in local supply and lower outsourcing costs should result. By the same token, their theoretical argument states that when the IT outsourcing markets are not local (though they need not be international, they could simply be more distant), then the local supply of IT outsourcing services, and the related prices, will not greatly affect demand for these services. The authors’ logic as it relates to the two different types of outsourced IT services is compelling: programming and design projects require communication about detailed user requirements between the contracting user and the vendor. Hosting, on the other hand, costs less in terms of coordination between the user and the vendor. The authors report that the probability of outsourcing programming and design increases with the local supply of outsourcing, and there is a timewise trend in this direction. The outsourcing of hosting decisions, however, is more sensitive to local demand--supply dynamics, especially when the user firm requires very low network downtime and strong security safeguards. The fourth paper is by Michel Benaroch, Mark Jeffery, Robert J. Kauffman, and Sandeep Shah, entitled "Option-Based Risk Management: A Field Study of Sequential Information Technology Investment Decisions." The authors study the actual application of an option-based risk management (OBRiM) framework, and its accompanying theoretical perspective and methodology, in a large IT investment problem. These problems involve alternative investment structures, each of which offers different financial returns, and each of which may impose a different risk profile for the firm. The authors evaluate the application of the OBRiM methodology to surface the costs, benefits, and risks associated with a complex sequential investment setting, both with and without real options. The methodology combines traditional, purchased real options, which subsequently create strategic flexibility for the decision maker, with implicit or embedded real options, those that are available with no specific investment required provided the decision maker recognizes them. This combination helps the decision maker both (1) explicitly surface all of his strategic choices and (2) accurately value those choices, including those that require prior enabling investments. The authors argue that their approach helps managerial decision makers to determine which real options ought to be embedded in an IT investment to manage risk effectively for the future. The authors further state that in view of IT investment-specific risks, expected levels of business value can be enhanced by embedding carefully chosen real options to make contingent investments to build desirable flexibility, so that it is possible to avoid the worst predicted outcomes associated with unavoidable risks. The authors report that the main benefits for IT investment decision makers are the simplification of real options analysis, better accuracy in analyzing the risks, and more effective support for forward-looking planning. The fifth paper, "Comparison of Software Quality Under Perpetual Licensing and Software as a Service," is by Vidyanand Choudhary. The author reports that software as a service (SaaS) is a rapidly growing model for software licensing that involves the user’s purchasing a subscription from the software publisher, instead of buying a perpetual use license. The interesting difference with this new approach is that the incentives for the software producer change so that we are more likely to see new features of the software being released as the innovations occur. This is in contrast to the more well-known business models of Microsoft and Apple, which release significant new products that often are indistinguishable from the upgrades of different aspects of the functionality of their existing software. The author develops a two-period analytical model of software producer investment that is applicable to software products that can be continuously upgraded over time. He shows that SaaS licensing leads to greater investment in product development under most conditions and that, as a result, we should expect to see higher-quality SaaS software products offered in equilibrium in comparison to perpetually licensed software products. The outcome should be well appreciated in the marketplace, because it seems like "all boats rise." Even though the producers of SaaS software may be able to obtain high profitability, it is also likely to be the case that consumers will benefit from higher social welfare associated with continuously updated software products. The sixth paper of the Special Section is by Rajiv M. Dewan, Marshall L. Freimer, and Yabing Jiang. The authors present "A Temporary Monopolist: Taking Advantage of Information Transparency on the Web." In the past several years, this journal has published several influential papers that have dealt with issues involving information exploitation, poaching of strategic knowledge and intellectual property, and related developments that create unique economic dynamics around competitive information in the digital marketplace of the Internet. The present paper extends that research stream by considering the possibility that information that is shared publicly on an e-commerce Web site is not only available for use by the firm’s customers but is also available for use by competitors who have the technical capacity and strategic acumen to exploit it. In the context of a duopoly game-theoretic model of competition involving e-tailers and consumers, the authors study what happens when the e-tailers set prices for a commodity product with limited supply, but simultaneously try to enhance the quality of their services to customers by identifying inventory stockouts online. We have all seen this with cameras and other consumer electronics ("On backorder"), airline tickets ("Only two seats left!"), and other goods sold on the Internet. The authors distinguish between firms with higher and lower fill rates for orders, and explain why their model predicts that more consumers will tend to visit the high fill rate e-tailer first when dynamic pricing is used than when static pricing is used. They also report results to suggest that consumer welfare is greater under dynamic pricing in the presence of software agent strategies that mine competitor information about inventory levels, due to consumers’ lower search costs. The seventh paper, "Digital Consumer Networks and Producer--Consumer Collaboration: Innovation and Product Development in the Video Game Industry," is by Reina Y. Arakji and Karl R. Lang. This research examines the role of user-generated content in the competitive strategy of firms, in the tradition of Eric von Hippel and the authors’ previous work in HICSS mini-tracks. They note that modders’ extensions to computer games can make the original game more attractive to buyers and can serve as a complement, or they can compete with the game or with the original game developers’ planned extensions. The authors note that modders can be encouraged through incentives--principally royalties. The job of modders can be made easier through the division of the original game into a core engine and the game libraries; providing the modders with a development kit to create their own game libraries enables modders to develop their own games more easily while still requiring that users purchase the core engine from the original developers. The authors examine alternative strategies for game developers to encourage complementarity with modders and to provide financial incentives and support tools, while simultaneously protecting their intellectual property. They develop optimal strategies for game developers, within the context of existing intellectual property regimes. The authors use economic models to determine how much systems openness to provide to modders and the size of financial incentives and royalties sharing to offer. The reviewers of early versions of these papers for the 2007 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences and the JMIS reviewers deserve our generous thanks for providing critical and insightful developmental reviewing. We also thank the participants at HICSS for their useful input. Dongwon Lee of Korea University, Ajay Kumar of the Government of India, and Ryan Sougstad of the University of Minnesota offered special support through helpful debriefing notes on the authors’ HICSS presentations. These led the coeditors to request additional changes to the post-HICSS revised papers. We also appreciate the help of our colleagues at the Carlson School of Management of the University of Minnesota, the W.P. Carey School of Business of Arizona State University, the Simon Graduate School of Management of the University of Rochester, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Finally, we acknowledge the long-term support of Ralph Sprague (HICSS Conference Chair), Hugh Watson (HICSS Track Chair, Organizational Systems and Technology), and Vladimir Zwass (Editor-in-Chief, JMIS), without whom neither this Special Section nor the sessions on which it is based would have been possible.

The Complementary Effects of E-Markets on Existing Supplier--Buyer Relationships in a Supply Chain - Xia, Mu; Xia, Nan (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2008)
E-markets have been established in many industries as a sourcing option for buyers. The existing literature focuses on the substitutional effect of e-markets on the traditional supply chain, yet in many situations, e-markets are used by buyers as a benchmarking tool in negotiations with traditional suppliers. This paper examines the role of e-markets in price negotiations and relationship-specific investments. We find that e-markets can be an effective tool to stimulate the traditional supplier's relationship- specific investments, lower the procurement prices, and improve the buyer's profitability and the supply-chain efficiency. Therefore, e-markets can complement rather than substitute for the traditional relationship-based supply chain. When there is quality uncertainty in the e-market offering, two effects of quality uncertainty on e-market adoption are identified. Better quality on average will increase e-market adoption, but surprisingly, increasing quality dispersion of e-markets will also help. Therefore, e-markets should strive to enlist suppliers with better quality products, but do not need to worry too much about the quality dispersion. Having better price transparency will also help in attracting more business from buyers.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2015)
The Special Issue on Applied Science/Engineering Research, guest edited by Robert O. Briggs, Jay F. Nunamaker, Jr., and Justin S. Giboney, makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role of design-science research in Information Systems. The “Guest Editors’ Introduction” goes beyond the traditional function of such works. It sets out the epistemological stance of design-centered research against other forms of scientific inquiry and defines—passionately—the role of this work in the advancement of science. This scholarly credo reminds us once again about the distinctive features of knowledge as compared to information: knowledge is always provisional and is always being advanced in a multimethodological collective effort. The first two guest editors are principal contributors to design-oriented research in information systems, a method that distinguishes us from the cognate disciplines. Therefore, it will be highly rewarding for readers to study their introduction and the first paper in the Special Issue, in which they and their coauthors further discuss the role of design research. This also applies to the other papers in the issue that show what we can contribute to the family of disciplines. The two papers that open the general section discuss topics that are not very frequently spoken about in our journals: virtue and vice. The first work empirically explores the exciting thesis that information technology (IT) can serve to develop organizational virtues to lie at the foundations of organizational innovation. Sutirtha Chatterjee, Gregory Moody, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Suranjan Chakraborty, and Andrew Hardin ground themselves in Aristotelean virtue ethics. They develop and test a comprehensive model that leads from three organizational IT affordances to the four fundamental virtues and on to improvisational capabilities and innovativeness. The “IT-virtues-innovation” model proposed here opens a new vein of research on organizational information systems (IS). It deserves to be explored, expanded, and challenged in succeeding works. To look at the darker side, the next paper moves us to the innovation effects of Machiavellian behavior at the individual level of analysis. The context here is that of innovation contests, an important component of value co-creation, crowdsourced or not. Katja Hutter, Johann Füller, Julia Hautz, Volker Bilgram, and Kurt Matzler parse Machiavellianism into three behavioral traits and find that these have differential effects on the quantity and quality of contribution to contests. Indeed, the researchers find that some personality traits that lead to amoral behavior may have positive effects on innovation. Taken together with the preceding paper, these two works serve as an opening to a new research program in the study of the role of IS in organizational innovation. Focus on design as a pragmatic holistic pursuit and as a transdisciplinary research field has acquired new salience and new generality. In particular, design of artifacts broadly understood, such as software, algorithms, architectures, or models, is—or should be—at the core of our discipline. Design science research (DSR) in information systems began with a JMIS paper published a quarter century ago [1]. Progress has been made since; the Special Issue above is one testimony to that. And yet—to be honest—more could have been accomplished. After all, this is our essential endowment among the disciplines that study and aim to positively influence organizations. Here, Nicolas Prat, Isabelle Comyn-Wattiau, and Jacky Akoka expand the foundations of DSR by introducing a taxonomy of evaluation methods of IS artifacts. The taxonomy is parsimonious and, beyond that, reveals the lacunae in our design work. By recursively applying the evaluation criteria to the taxonomy itself, we will see further development. Open source software coexists and competes with the more traditional, proprietary one. In the concluding paper of the issue, Michael Sacks studies the nature of this competition. Will both survive? How will the producers of proprietary software be able to differentiate their offering from open source software? Using a formal game-theoretic analysis of this highly competitive arena, the author identifies the market segments to which each of the software-development formats caters and goes on to predict the evolving contours of coexistence of the two types of software. The triad of proprietary producers, open source software communities, and the suppliers of the products complementary to the open source will benefit from the insights offered by this analysis. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Special Section: The Growing Complexity of Enterprise Software - Briggs, Robert O; Nunamaker, Jay F (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020)
Robert O. Briggs (rbriggs@mail.sdsu.edu) is a Professor of Information Systems at San Diego State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Information Systems from University of Arizona. Dr. Briggs researches the cognitive foundations of collaboration and uses his findings to design and deploy new collaboration systems and new collaborative work practices. He is co-founder of Collaboration Engineering as a scholarly discipline, co-inventor of the thinkLets design pattern language, and the inventor of Collaboration Systems, comprising Computer Assisted Collaboration Engineering and Process Support Applications. Dr. Briggs has published more than 250 peer-reviewed manuscripts related to economic, social, political, cognitive, emotional, and technological aspects of collaboration. He lectures around the world on the logic of scientific inquiry. Jay F. Nunamaker, Jr.(jnunamaker@cmi.arizona.edu; corresponding author) is Regents and Soldwedel Professor of MIS, Computer Science and Communication and Director of the Center for the Management of Information and the National Center of Excellence for Border Security and Immigration, Emeritus at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in operations research and systems engineering from Case Institute of Technology. Dr. Nunamaker has held a professional engineer’s license since 1965. His specialization is in the fields of system analysis and design, collaboration technology, and deception detection. The commercial product Group Systems ThinkTank, based on his research, is often referred to as the gold standard for structured collaboration systems. He was inducted into the Design Science Hall of Fame and received the LEO Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Information Systems. Dr. Nunamaker was featured in the July 1997 issue of Forbes Magazine on technology as one of eight key innovators in information technology. He founded the MIS Department at the University of Arizona in 1974 and served as department head for 18 years. IntroductionIn the 1960s, software development centered on single-purpose applications to run on stand-alone computers. The intervening decades have seen exponential growth in system complexity with, for example, integrated enterprise-wide suites of integrated capabilities serving users across the globe. Enterprise system infrastructure includes multiple levels of security, collaboration capabilities for the people working as teams, fraud detection, and data fusion, to name but a few. These aspects add to the complexity of the application. Also, software can do more as a result of processing speed and data storage. This special issue presents three papers, each of which considers the complexity of current systems from a different perspective. The first paper, “Decision Problems in Blockchain Governance: Old Wine in New Bottles or Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes? ” by Rafael Ziolkowski, Gianluca Miscione, and Gerhard Schwabe, addresses the complex question of managing software capabilities built on blockchain technology. Current research presents a wide array of novel potentially disruptive blockchain application domains, but a recent Gartner survey of CEO’s found that few companies have current plans to implement such applications. A primary impediment appears to be that managers still do not understand how it works or what they can do with it. This paper focuses on complex issues pertaining to the governance of blockchain systems derived from examination of 14 such systems in four application domains. Based on academic literature, semi-structured interviews with representatives from those organizations, and content analysis of grey literature, common problems in blockchain governance have been singled out and contextualized. The identification of these problems enriches the scarce body of knowledge on the governance of blockchain systems, resulting in a better understanding of how blockchain governance links to existing concepts and how it is enacted in practice. The next paper, “Idea Convergence Quality in Open Innovation Crowdsourcing: A Cognitive Load Perspective” by Xusen Chen, Shizuan Fu, Triparna de Vreede, Gert-Jan de Vreede, Isabella Seeber, Ronald Maier, and Barbara Weber, examines another complexity challenge. Today’s systems can support large-scale collaboration involving hundreds or thousands of people who are using vast stores of semi-structured and unstructured data: how can participants converge on and build shared understanding of the ideas that will be useful for attaining their goals in a short amount of time? This paper prototypes and tests a solution. The exemplar domain for this study is an open innovation crowdsourcing application for online crowds that can quickly converge from massive numbers of candidate ideas of varying quality to a small set of clear, non-redundant ideas that are worthy of further consideration. Drawing on Cognitive Load Theory, they executed a laboratory experiment to test three types of cognitive load manipulations for large-scale convergence. Findings show that germane cognitive load has a positive correlation with a) the quality of converged ideas, b) satisfaction with process, and c) satisfaction with outcome. By contrast, intrinsic cognitive load had a negative association with satisfaction-with-process and satisfaction with outcome. Extraneous cognitive load had only a negative with satisfaction-with-outcome. The study identified positive moderating relationships of knowledge self-efficacy, perceived goal clarity, and need for cognition on the relationship between germane cognitive load and idea convergence quality. The third paper, “Too Busy to Be Manipulated: How Multitasking with Technology Improves Deception Detection in Collaborative Teamwork” by Nathan W. Twyman, Jeffrey G. Proudfoot, Ann-Frances Cameron, Eric Case, Judee K. Burgoon, and Douglas P. Twitchell, deals with the complexity of assessing the credibility of collaboration partners in the digital workplace. Deception is an unfortunate staple in collaborative work. Guarding against team members’ deceptive tactics and hidden agendas can be difficult and may seem even more difficult in technology-driven business environments that have made multitasking during teamwork increasingly commonplace. This research develops a foundation for a nuanced theoretical understanding of these conditions. This paper reports a laboratory study involving a collaborative game that manipulated deception and multitasking behaviors in a real-time virtual-team environment. Under the conditions of this study, some amount of information multitasking can actually improve a participant’s ability to detect deception detection. The paper conjectures that this may happen because multitaskers engage less in the team conversation, which makes them less susceptible to deceptive manipulations. These three papers were drawn from the best papers nominees and winners at the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. We commend them to your reading.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2014)
AS YOU READ THE ENCOMPASSING SPECIAL ISSUE on the Economics of Electronic Commerce, guest edited by Ravi Bapna, Anitesh Barua, and Andrew B. Whinston, you will realize how far we have come in the two decades of both doing business online and in our study of e commerce. Eight papers of the Special Issue present nuanced economic analyses of the various forms of electronic markets for a variety of physical and digital products, as well as of the collaborative commerce in supply chains. The works included here, after a competitive vetting and editing under the supervision of the Guest Editors, surface new understandings of achieving critical order mass in launching options exchanges, collaborative demand forecasting by supply-chain participants, customized bundling of information goods, competing in the app marketplaces, gifting for status in virtual worlds, the effects on online music piracy of advice giving and taking, and of effective mechanisms in pay-per-bid auctions. The richness of the subject matter and of the theoretical prisms the authors deploy to study the problems will be further discussed by the Guest Editors in their introduction to the Special Issue. The first of the two papers in the general section investigates the ever-more salient antecedents to employees’ breaching of corporate requirements concerning information systems (IS) security. John D’Arcy, Tejaswini Herath, and Mindy K. Shoss use coping theory to probe how the stress induced by frequently inadequate (in various respects) security requirements affects the noncompliance behavior of workers who might then place IS security in peril. We know from the available disclosures of security breaches, and we infer in our assumptions about the nondisclosures, how important the matter is. The authors are able to validate a model that relates technostress to the adverse security-related behaviors and are thus in a position to offer valuable guidelines for corporate practices that would ameliorate the stressful effects of IS security requirements. There is also a significant novel contribution to our theoretical understanding of technostress here. The outsourcing of information technology has, of course, served for decades as a means of cost reduction. However, it can offer much more to the companies that think strategically toward developing a true relationship with their outsourcing partner. Incentive alignment is necessary to develop a longitudinal win-win perspective on the outsourcing relationship. This is often said, but not often done via appropriate contractual arrangements. Of necessity incomplete, long-term outsourcing contracts can build in the mechanisms necessary for both sides to eschew opportunistic behavior and, in particular, information poaching. Xiaotong Li, the author of our concluding paper, offers a formal model and shows how to design the appropriate outsourcing relationship. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1996)
DATA QUALITY IS A PERSISTENT AND SERIOUS PROBLEM, underlying untrustworthiness of many information systems. Absence of quality is by far not limited to the lack of accuracy. This point is emphasized by Richard Y. Wang and Diane M. Strong, who in the opening paper of this issue present a multidimensional parse of the notion of data quality. They use the methods of marketing research developed to determine the characteristics of product quality in order to derive a four-pronged conceptualization of data quality. These characteristics reflect not only the intrinsic quality, such as accuracy, but also contextual suitability, quality of the chosen data representation, and quality of the provided access to the data. An important feature of this work is that the framework has been derived from the stated needs of data consumers. Indeed, preliminary evidence shows that the use of the framework can contribute to a better understanding of what data quality means in a specific organizational context. Two papers center on strategic organizational issues. A set of organizational factors that may facilitate of inhibit the development of strategic information systems by a firm has been isolated by William R. King and Thompson S. H. Teo. Starting with a comprehensive list of the potential facilitators and inhibitors compiled or inferred from the literature, the researchers conducted an extensive survey, and with the aid of statistical techniques obtained a compact set of facilitators and inhibitors. Since the latter in particular are rarely discussed, both other researchers and practitioners will benefit from thinking through this set of deciding factors. As business globalization progresses apace, some firms competing in a heavily affected industry, such as financial services, rely heavily on information technologies to integrate their operations in order to serve their multinational customers. Others do not. Jahangir Karimi, Yash P. Gupta, and Toni M. Somers find that a firm's competitive strategy and the maturity of its information technology are important predictors of its response to major milestones in globalization, such as free trade or regional unification agreements. It is vital that MIS managers be keenly attuned to the factors that would mediate their firm's response to the ongoing environmental change. Information systems outsourcing may receive waves of good or bad press, but it is a major avenue of service delivery. Varun Grover, Myun Joong Cheon, and James T.C. Teng study several factors of outsourcing success and find that this success is strongly correlated with the outsourcing of systems operations and telecommunications-indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that these are the most frequently outsourced functions. Rather predictably, service quality and reaching a degree of partnership between the service provider and the customer firm are important to success. Future investigators would do well to study the effects of the length of these relationships on the one hand and the nature of service contracts on the other on the success achieved. Two papers that follow deal with information systems development. Shouhong Wang offers a methodology for object-oriented systems analysis. The methodology formalizes some aspects of the analysis procedure, relying on the four types of object classes identified by the author by studying the protocols of actual systems analyses. An experimental study has shown advantages of the proposed method of object-oriented analysis as compared with structured systems analysis. Protocol analysis of the work of experienced developers can lead to further formalization of the methodology. Girish H. Subramanian and George E. Zarnich study the productivity associated with the use of integrated computer-aided software engineering (ICASE) tools. In agreement with other recent work, the authors find the function point measure of the proposed system to be a good predictor of the development effort. However, the authors also find that the technical complexity factor (which serves to adjust the function point measure) does not help in gauging the extent of work in the ICASE environment. Since the envisaged complexity of the specific project is highly variable and clearly important, substitutes have to be sought. The authors find that particularly beneficial is the use of ICASE tools combined with rapid prototyping. Information technology pervades all aspects of our life-and information systems may even endanger it. While far from completely formed, legal mechanisms exist to partly protect the customers of IS developers and the public from faulty systems. It is well that the developers be aware of these mechanisms and use this knowledge in their decision making. Bijoy Bordoloi, Kathleen Mykytyn, and Peter P. Mykytyn, Jr. Present a framework for assessing the possibility of an injury that could result from the development of a faulty system and assessing the legal liability associated with fielding a given system. It should be obvious that this is not a substitute for a quality system development process or an ethical approach to the issue. It is, rather, a necessary precursor or an adjunct to the development of many systems. Robert L. Leitheiser and Salvatore T. March explore the influence of the representation method chosen for the database structure on the ease of learning and of use of the database system. This work complements research that investigates the influence of the selected query language on these outcomes. The authors find that the way in which the database structure is presented to the users may have dramatic effects on user performance. What behavioral factors influence the performance of organizational accounting information systems, perhaps the most common functional information system? A detailed study performed by Jong-min Choe not only identifies the influence factors, but shows that their effects depend on the stage of the system's evolution in the firm. For example, even such a home truth as the benefits of the involvement of top management cannot be taken for granted, and the extent of the benefit reaped from the training and education of end users also depends on the system's evolution stage.

Special Section: Strategic and Competitive Information Systems - Weber, Bruce W; Clemons, Eric K (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1997)
FOR THE EIGHTH YEAR, THIS SPECIAL SECTION ON STRATEGIC and Competitive Information Systems presents innovative research on the impact of information systems on organizations' strategy and competitive performance. The papers in this section this year emphasize how information technology can dramatically alter the economics of firms and entire industries. The authors of each of these papers examine profound transformations; two of the three papers deal with the difficulty of seeing the need for change or the effects of change that information technology can bring about. The first paper examines ways in which regulators of health insurance can consistently and systematically exacerbate the very problems that they are trying to alleviate. The second paper examines ways in which well-meaning changes in job descriptions, decision rights, and employee empowerment can lower levels of customer satisfaction and reduce firm performance. The final paper examines some counterintuitive implications of the roles of intermediaries for market quality that need to be considered when modifying the market structure of a stock exchange. Earlier versions of all three works were published in the Proceedings of the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science held in January 1997. "Evaluating Alternative Information Regimes in the Private Health Insurance Industry: Managing the Social Cost of Private Information," by Eric K. Clemons and Matt E. Thatcher, examines the consequences of informed self-selection in insurance markets. The authors find that increasing medical test information, combined with consumers' self-selection of health insurance alternatives, presents a number of challenges for consumers, consumer activists, health insurance executives, and regulators. Consumers and activists have been pressuring regulators to limit the amount of information insurance companies are allowed to use when rating applicants and to limit the pricing and policy coverage exclusions that may be employed in designing policies. The authors' results show that, rather than helping high-risk consumers, these activities tend paradoxically to leave the highest-risk consumers no better off while significantly harming the lowest-risk segments of the applicant pool. "Competing in Information-Intensive Services: Analyzing the Economic Impact of Task Consolidation and Employee Empowerment," by Abraham Seidmann and Arun Sundararajan, analyzes alternative configurations of service processes and decision responsibilities. The paper examines the performance of a firm seeking to maximize profits by offering each customer a tailored design to maximize satisfaction. The authors use a queuing model of firm output to examine rigorously the implications of different designs for the work flow of the firm, varying the decision rights (centralization or employee empowerment) and span of control (task consolidation) of employees. Their findings suggest that employee empowerment and task consolidation may have opposite effects, and that firms that simultaneously implement both during reengineering efforts may achieve suboptimal performance. This in turn suggests changes in the practice of reengineering process flows. "Next-Generation Securities Markets Systems: Experimental Investigations of Quote-Driven and Order-Driven Trading," by Robert A. Schwartz and Bruce W. Weber, describes how several quote-driven dealer markets are introducing new order-driven trading systems. The authors use experimental economics methods and analyze how the trading decisions made by twenty-four experimental subjects were affected by alternative trading systems. The results indicate that investors trading in dealer markets will benefit from the introduction of order-driven trading to augment, but not replace, the trading services provided by traditional dealer-intermediaries. The resulting hybrid market structure is likely to become more prevalent in global financial trading and will have important implications for investment and securities firms. ERIC K. CLEMONS AND BRUCE W. WEBER, Guest Editors

Special Section: Economics, Electronic Commerce, and Competitive Strategy - Clemons, Eric K; Dewan, Rajiv M; Kauffman, Robert J (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2001)
THE TITLE OF THIS YEAR'S SPECIAL SECTION of selected papers, whose initial versions were presented at the "Economics and Electronic Commerce," and "Information Technology and Competitive Strategy" mini-tracks of the 2001 Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS), reflects the increasing convergence of ideas from Economics and Information Systems (IS) research. This convergence has been occurring over the last several years and is related to the developments in e-commerce. IS research has been rapidly coming of age, driven by the ever-increasing importance of information technology (IT) in the marketplace, and the need for managers, investors, policy-makers, and the public to understand how to more effectively navigate in our highly technological world. But as IS research matures, so too do the demands that practitioners put upon the information that our research produces in terms of its relevance and usability. Although the importance of scientific rigor and of analytical precision are undiminished, the messages that emerge from our research for the marketplace need to be crafted and targeted better than ever before. But how quickly the world of technology changes, changing our research directions along with it! No longer is it sufficient to study the formation or business models of electronic markets in e-commerce. Today, IS researchers need to grasp their innermost workings. As a result, many of us aspire to understand what will give these new organizational forms sustainable competitive advantage, allowing them to thrive and create value in the marketplace, and how organizations can strategize to maximize profits in their presence. Similarly, if the Age of the Internet has brought the marketplace an ever-expanding set of information goods and virtual products, then it also has brought senior managers at leading firms increasingly complex strategic challenges from competitors they never knew they would have. In short, we want our research to speak in clear tones to them, so they will recognize, as we do, the importance of the solutions that IS research offers for some of the leading applied problems of our time. When we consider the newest research directions in technology adoption and IT investment analysis, for example, there is an increasing impetus to find new solutions and new interpretations for the long-standing issues that senior managers continue to face with technology: evolving and uncertain standards, the productivity paradox of information technology investment, the failure of the marketplace to coalesce around the appropriate externality-bearing network goods, and knowing when to make the tough decisions about technology infrastructure. The same holds true for the design of information goods, and the strategic choices that firms must make about how to position and sell them in the marketplace. We think that the authors whose research work is presented in this Special Section of the Journal of Management Information Systems have their thumbs on the pulse of the marketplace this way. Their work meets the challenge we have set out. The reader can tell from the range of problems and topics that the authors have selected. But the more telling aspect lies in the interpretations and insights that the authors' research results have to offer. We believe they will be of equal interest to practitioners (properly packaged in executive education lectures and cases) as they will be to academic researchers. We invite the reader to enjoy some of the research that we have helped to shape this year through our conference and journal review processes, and through the workshop-like atmosphere that makes our HICSS mini-tracks a special place to share the newest research findings. Matt E. Thatcher of the University of Arizona and Jim R. Oliver of INSEAD lead off this special section with "The Impact of Technology Investments on a Firm's Production Efficiency, Product Quality, and Productivity." Their study probes the reasons for the mixed findings on the business value of information technology associated with the "productivity paradox." The authors propose that there has been insufficient consideration given to the interaction of production efficiency and enhanced product quality in the realization of firm productivity. The authors present a model that allows for the possibility that improved profits and productivity gains may actually trade off, rather than both move in the same direction in the presence of information technology investments. The explanation for this, according to the authors' analytical model, can be boiled down to whether the investments reduce the firm's fixed overhead costs-unequivocally leading to productivity gains-or the firm's variable costs of production. Changes to the latter lead to more competitive design, development, and production costs, and improve price recovery, product quality, and product sales margins. What they do not always do, however, is prompt parallel gains in productivity. An exciting finding in this work is that the authors are able to illustrate when it is possible to predict that there will be a productivity gain or productivity decline due to information technology investment, and hence, a new interpretation of why there actually ought to be a productivity paradox. Perhaps the reader can appreciate, as a result, why this paper was selected as best research paper in the "Information Technology and Competitive Strategy Mini-Track" at HICSS, and how importantly its message will bear on electronic commerce-related technology investment decision making. Most researchers who use the theories and methods of economics in Information Systems research know that there is much to be learned from constructing analytical models when it is impossible or impractical to collect data on a specific phenomenon. In "Should We Wait? Network Externalities, Compatibility and Electronic Billing Adoption," Yoris A. Au and Robert J. Kauffman of the University of Minnesota examine competitive strategy related to technology solution adoption in electronic bill payment and presentment, at a time when widespread diffusion has yet to occur in the United States. The authors analyze institutional relationships in e-billing and find that the current industry structure precludes adoption decision-making without the consideration given to building in option and contingencies to defray the risks of a rapidly changing marketplace. The authors find that there are multiple intermediaries (i.e., banks and bill consolidators) between biller/vendor firms (i.e., electrical utilities and department stores), and the consumers who buy from them. This "multi-partite adoption" problem makes electronic bill payment and presentment technology adoption more a matter of "rational expectations" about market developments and emerging standards, than a precise capital-budgeting calculus. With this industry backdrop in mind, the authors employ a welfare-economics modeling perspective to portray how firm adoption patterns are likely to vary in the presence of non-sponsored and sponsored technology e-billing solutions. Their model characterizes a number of conditions under which exercising an "adoption option" is a first-best strategy, as originally suggested by Choi and Thum. The present authors' partial equilibrium modeling perspective delineates some of the key issues that the marketplace will need to overcome in the next several years, as e-billing technologies become more widely adopted. The remainder of the Special Section is devoted to research directions involving competitive strategy and the sale of information goods. Ravi Aron and Eric K. Clemons of the Wharton School are first up with "Achieving the Optimal Balance Between Investment in Quality and Investment in Self-Promotion." Their article sheds light on how firms should form competitive strategy for the redesign or repositioning of their information goods when what they offer no longer is a good match for what their customers want to buy. The authors distinguish between information consumption products and information production products. The former is essentially an experience good for the consumer (e.g., where experience is gained by reading, watching, listening, or learning), and the latter involve the range of information goods (e.g., software, databases, telecomm protocols, or Web page formatting standards) that enable the delivery of other information goods for consumption. The authors develop an analytical model that enables them to characterize the conditions under which one of four recommended strategies will be undertaken relative to improperly positioned information goods. This is primarily determined by expected profits when the ratio of repositioning to rebuilding costs, and the extent of repeat customer purchases are considered. The authors bring seller incentives into bold relief by characterizing a choice set of strategies that include two extreme strategies-"Lie Like Hell" and "Tell the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth"-and one more moderate approach. They also point out the frictions that arise in determining the correct strategy when there are buyer product return costs and information goods complexity varies. In "Information Goods and Vertical Differentiation," Hemant Bhargava of Pennsylvania State University and Vidyanand Choudhary of Carnegie Mellon University examine the efficacy of second-degree price discrimination applied to information goods when the seller is a monopolist. Firms that can discern heterogeneous customer preferences for different quality products apply vertical differentiation by segmenting their marketplace to maximize profits, and developing a product line with varying levels of quality, features, and functionality. However the authors argue that firms that sell information goods are unlikely to profit from creating the conditions under which their customers self-select through vertical differentiation. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom, however, the authors show through an analytical model of product line design choices and development costs that the trade-off with increased sales revenues is inopportune due to the likely event of the cannibalization of higher quality information by their lower quality equivalents. The emphasis shifts in "Forward Versus Spot Buying of Information Goods," by Pavan Gundepudi, Nils Rudi, and Abraham Seidmann of the University of Rochester, to a careful consideration of competitive strategy and organizational decision-making in the sale of information goods in different ways than Bhargava and Choudhary discuss. The kinds of purchase situations the authors consider for information goods are subscriptions for newspapers and magazines, and the distribution rights to videos and music. The authors develop a model that incorporates consumer uncertainty and the recognition that consumers will trade off between lower-priced forward-buying and higher-priced future spot buying. The authors develop their modeling framework in a series of steps that makes the analysis increasingly realistic and compelling for the treatment of real world spot and futures purchases of information goods on the Internet. Research of this sort helps to set the agenda for refining our understanding of how competitive strategy should be formulated by firms that operate in information goods markets, and should offer contributions both to Information Systems and Marketing Science research. In closing, we offer special thanks to a number of people who supported our work on this Special Section. Vladimir Zwass's support is evident from the fact that he was willing to provide us with five paper slots this year, up from the usual three. He recognized the quality of the work that he encouraged us to bring to the journal. We also offer special thanks to Yu-Ming Wang of the California State University at Long Beach, who was a contributor to our review process for HICSS paper during Summer 2000. Alina Chircu of the University of Texas at Austin also offered her assistance as an associate editor and reviewer every step along the way. Bin Wang of the University of Minnesota also offered logistical support with the Journal of Management Information Systems review process for the articles in this issue. Finally, the coeditors offer hearty thanks to all of the reviewers who contributed their insights to help make this research first-rate.

Special Issue: Decision-Making and a Hierarchy of Understanding - Briggs, Robert O; De Vreede, Gert-Jan; Nunamaker Jr, Jay F; Sprague Jr, Ralph H (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2002)
THE DISCIPLINE OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS (IS), in the past, focused on the delivery of information to decision-makers in a timely, accurate, and complete manner with a minimum of cognitive and economic cost for acquisition, processing, storage, and retrieval. Thirty years ago, when our discipline began, information was deemed superior to data for decision-making, because information had meaning that was not inherent in raw data. Over the intervening decades, our perspective has broadened. Decision-makers need more than information, they need understanding at many levels of abstraction. In the past, a number of authors have offered various insightful and useful definitions of the terms data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. These different definitions illuminate the different perspectives in which these terms may be considered. In the context of decision-making, it might be useful to think of them as a hierarchy of understanding: Data : understanding symbols in the context where they were collected; Information : understanding relationships among data in the context where they are presented; Knowledge : understanding patterns that appear in information in the context of the task at hand; Wisdom : understanding principles of cause and consequence that underlie emergent patterns. The papers in this special issue address critical issues of knowledge as understanding by the decision-maker. They focus variously on the creation of knowledge, the discovery of knowledge, and the transmission of knowledge. The papers were drawn from the best of those presented at the Thirty-fourth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). The paper by Massey, Montoya-Weiss, and O'Driscoll won the Best Paper award in the Digital Technologies for Management Track. Of the 1,220 papers submitted to HICSS, 470 were accepted to the conference. The coeditors of this special issue selected 62 papers that had been nominated for best paper awards, and an additional 12 papers that they deemed meritorious, for an initial pool of 74 papers. Each of these was read and rated by at least two of the coeditors, who then selected a pool of 15 finalists. At least three of the coeditors and at least three outside reviewers then reviewed those 15 in detail. The top eight from that set are included in this special issue. The first paper in this issue addresses a number of topics centering on the creation, discovery, and transmission of knowledge. A team of nine authors combined forces to present a visionary piece of work about how technology could evolve to support communities around bodies of knowledge that change quickly. The paper "Toward Virtual Community Knowledge Evolution" was written by Bieber, Engelbart, Furuta, Hiltz, Noll, Preece, Stohr, Turoff, and Van de Walle. The vision is perhaps best expressed in their own words: We propose augmenting a multimedia document repository (digital library) with innovative knowledge evolution support, including computer-mediated communications, community process support, decision support, advanced hypermedia features, and conceptual knowledge structures. These tools, and the techniques developed around them, would enable members of a virtual community to learn from, contribute to, and collectively build upon the community's knowledge and improve many member tasks. This paper will no doubt become the foundation for a stream of research that will run through IS research for many years to come. It draws on many existing disciplines, but reconceives them in a new, collaborative knowledge evolution support system (CKESS). The next two papers focus on knowledge creation. Massey, Montoya-Weiss, and O'Driscoll offer an explanation of a performance-centered design methodology from bringing structure to ill-defined knowledge-intensive processes. Their method provides the means to develop a holistic view of a performance environment, and the complex interdependencies between the organizational context, business processes, and individual performers. Having articulated the methodology, they present an insightful case study to demonstrate how the model can be applied in the field, and the resulting gains that it can produce. Hender, Dean, Rodgers, and Nunamaker address issues surrounding the creation of knowledge with a paper that presents the results of an empirical test of the Cognitive Network Model, an emerging theory of creativity. In their paper, "An Examination of the Impact of Stimuli Type and GSS Structure on Creativity: Brainstorming Versus Non-Brainstorming Techniques in a GSS Environment," they present an experiment that compares the emergence of creative ideas under three different groups support systems (GSS) creativity techniques: free brainstorming, assumption reversals, and analogies. Their findings provide initial support for the theory, and provide insights into the circumstances under which each of the three techniques might be useful. The next pair of papers focuses on knowledge discovery. The paper, "Contents Matching Defined by Prototypes-Methodology Verification with Books of the Bible," by Visa, Toivonen, Vanharanta, and Back reports on an experiment that tested whether a prototype-matching algorithm could search massive document stores and find documents that closely matched a prototype document in content and meaning. This experiment was conducted by using several books of the Bible as prototypes, and using the other books of the Bible as the document store. The Bible provided a useful test domain because (1) it is available in digital form, (2) its meanings are widely known and agreed to, and (3) it is available in many languages, but meaning of the passages has been rigorously preserved from translation to translation. By using multiple languages and multiple translations in each language, the authors were able to tease out the effects of language, style, and message on the accuracy and precision of retrieval. Pomerol, Brézillon, and Pasquier, also focusing on knowledge discovery in their paper, "Operational Knowledge Representation for Practical Decision-Making," relate a fascinating account of developing technology to support decision-making when a crisis emerges in the Metro beneath the streets of Paris. Their system models the know-how of their most experienced people and presents it to subway operators in a form they can quickly perceive and use when a crisis emerges. Their approach overcomes some of the key limitations of decision trees, whereas maintaining relevant knowledge in a hierarchical structure. Papers in a third group take on issues of knowledge transmission. The paper by Bargeron, Grudin, Gupta, Sanocki, Li, and LeeTiernan, "Asynchronous Collaboration Around Multimedia Applied to On-Demand Education," is a fine example of the systems development research paradigm. This team moved through multiple phases of technology development, informed variously by laboratory experiments, field studies, and theoretical development. In the end they created a system that both provides support for theoretical propositions and provides a useful, enduring artifact from which society already derives benefit. The team focused on the challenges faced by asynchronous learning teams. They integrated the advantages of multimedia computer-aided instruction with the advantages of collaborative learning, and appear to have created a system that, to some extent, offsets the losses that might occur because learners are not working same-place-same-time. Sniezek, Wilkins, Wadlington, and Baumann deal with the transmission of knowledge as they make an intriguing and persuasive case for an innovative approach to computer-based training for crisis response in their paper, "Training for Crisis Decision-Making: Psychological Issues and Computer-Based Solutions." They present a thorough argument about the cognitive foundations of decision-making when time is short and the stakes are high. From there they argue for a technical approach, and describe an example training system that incorporates the principles they propose. They reinforce their case by presenting empirical results of system uses. Continuing a long history of research at NJIT on Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALN), Coppola, Hiltz, and Rotter examine the changing role of the professor in their paper, "Becoming a Virtual Professor: Pedagogical Roles and Asynchronous Learning Networks." The final paper of this special issue presents the results of in-depth interviews with 20 faculty members who taught part or all of their courses asynchronously over the Internet. The paper focuses on the changes they experienced from three perspectives: cognitive roles, management roles, and affective roles. They describe changes in "teaching persona" and changes in relationships with and among students. They address what went well, and what didn't, and suggest new directions for ALN technology. Each of these papers in some way creates knowledge for us to discover and transfer within and beyond our discipline. The lessons that can be drawn from the authors' research are many, and apply to researchers and practitioners alike. We commend these papers to your attention and hope that they will facilitate your own future efforts of knowledge creation, discovery, and transmission.

Special Issue: Technology Strategy for Electronic Marketplaces - Clemons, Eric K; Yu-Ming, Wang (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2000)
THIS SPECIAL SECTION SHOWCASES NEW RESEARCH that was initially presented at the 33d Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS-33) held in January 2000. The work included here illustrates contemporary thinking in competitive strategy and technology applied to product design and pricing on the Internet, the bundling of insurance products and public policy with respect to healthcare coverage, and the valuation of investments in electronic commerce technologies. Three different mini-tracks from HICSS-33 are represented by the articles "Economics and Electronic Commerce," "Information Technology and Market Structure," and "Strategic and Competitive Information Systems." These minitracks continue to be a vibrant forum for the discussion of current directions in Information Systems and Electronic Commerce research. In the first article, "Adoption of Internet-Based Product Customization and Pricing Strategies," Rajiv Dewan, Bing Jing, and Abraham Seidmann (all from the University of Rochester), examine the potential of special features, such as one-to-one marketing, personalization, and product customization in e-commerce. Today the Internet provides a new marketplace in which such powerful tracking technologies as web page registration, Internet cookies, collaborative filtering, and data mining combine to recast the basic relationship between buyers and sellers. Using these technologies, it is possible for a firm to create a continuous learning relationship with its customers, and, in the process, exploit the information it gathers to offer customized goods at special prices. Moreover, it is possible to apply this technique to production, using it to create further leverage for competitive value. But this also changes the competitive dynamics and relationships among similar firms in the marketplace. For example, early adopters will greatly benefit from these technologies, since such firms can sell more products and set a price with higher margins than competing conventional suppliers can. Flexible manufacturing technologies further enhance these firms' competitive advantage, making it more sustainable. Latecomers, in contrast, may find themselves in a difficult position. For them, offering customized products becomes a "hook up or lose out" proposition: to get any customers at all, the late-to-market firms must over-invest in technology to support product customization at a time when such an approach is no longer a differentiating strategy. The authors' analytical modeling results show that corporate adoption of product customization and one-to-one marketing approaches represent an equilibrium strategy brought on by competitive necessity. The second article shifts gears to examine policy issues in the individual insurance market in the healthcare industry that are made prominent by changing uses of information technology. In the article entitled "Managing the Costs of Informational Privacy: Pure Bundling as a Strategy in the Individual Health Insurance Market," Matt E. Thatcher (University of Arizona) and Eric K. Clemons (University of Pennsylvania) analyze the inefficiencies of current legislative prescriptions for how to deal with the possibility of health insurance discrimination based upon genetic screening. Advances in biomedical research and genetic testing make it possible for healthcare organizations to provide ever more accurate assessments of the risks of specific kinds of health problems that healthcare consumers are likely to encounter during their lives. Insurance companies, which have recently invested heavily in advanced data warehousing and data mining technologies, are similarly able to evaluate the risks associated with insuring specific individuals. The authors apply methods from industrial dynamics to develop simulation results that describe the efficacy of new approaches to bundling health insurance packages. The authors propose the idea of a pooling equilibrium, in which healthcare consumers who evaluate insurance bundles are shown to exhibit the same overall willingness-to-pay for a comprehensive insurance policy. Such large bundle insurance packages are shown to maximize the number of people who are insured, while safeguarding the viability of the insurance market, and maintaining equitable costs for those who are insured. The final article, "Limits to Value in Electronic Commerce-Related IT Investments," by Alina M. Chircu and Robert J. Kauffman (both of the University of Minnesota), presents a general evaluative framework for business process-level investments in technology infrastructures and information systems. The authors' conceptual framework characterizes ways in which the potential value of a technology for an adopter is eroded, resulting in less desirable levels of realized value. The authors examine several in-depth industry cases involving large-scale corporate travel systems investments that were studied in a multiyear, industry-sponsored field study. They find that the value flows that occur after the implementation of such systems are hindered by various kinds of limits to value, which act as inhibitors of value appropriation for the firm. The authors find that such limits to value can be overcome by collateral investments in co-specialized assets to the system, such as sponsorship, adoption subsidies, training, and so on, that unlock potential value. The outcomes of this research offer a theory-based road map for the study of business value in a variety of e-commerce technology investment settings. They will also enable corporate investors in Internet-based travel reservation systems to build more realistic expectations about the potential value of these innovations, and what pieces need to fall into place for these implementations to be successful.

Decision Support and Knowledge-Based Systems: A Special Issue - Stohr, Edward A (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1986)
This article presents an introduction to the issue by the guest editor; it focuses mainly on research into decision support systems.

Special Section: Strategic Integration of Blockchain Technology into Organizations - Kohli, Rajiv; Liang, Ting-Peng (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
Rajiv Kohli (Rajiv.Kohli@mason.wm.edu) is John N. Dalton Memorial Professor of Business at the Raymond A. Mason School of Business, William & Mary. Prior to joining academia, he was a Project Leader in Decision Support Services at Trinity Health. Dr. Kohli’s research has been published in Management Science, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, MIS Quarterly Executive and Journal of Operations Management, among other journals. He is a coauthor of the book The IT Payoff: Measuring Business Value of Information Technology Investment, published by Financial Times Prentice-Hall. He serves as a Senior Editor for Information Systems Research. Ting-Peng Liang (is.tpliang@gmail.com) is Director of the Electronic Commerce Research Center of National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan, ROC. He received a Ph.D. degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and is a Fellow, Leo Award Recipient, and Past President of the Association for Information Systems. Dr. Liang’s research interests include electronic commerce, data analytics, information systems strategy, and neural information systems. His papers have appeared in top journals such as MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of the AIS, Management Science, Operations Research, Decision Support Systems, Information & Management, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, among others. IntroductionBlockchain is an emerging technology that enables two or more entities to conduct secure transactions. After a blockchain transaction is executed, it cannot be altered because the transaction information is encrypted. The transactions are safeguarded because they are sealed in a block, linked with other blocks in a chain, and then shared with nodes across the Internet. These properties of blockchain technology create strategic opportunities for businesses, for example, by lowering transaction costs by eliminating the middlemen who charge a fee to verify and guarantee the authenticity of transactions. Although there are several promising use cases, we are yet to see widespread adoption and assimilation of blockchain in business strategy. A large number of papers associated with blockchain technology have been published in recent years. They cover a broad range of applications, ranging from global supply chain to cryptocurrency and intelligent manufacturing. Many organizations consider blockchain to be a revolutionary technology that can create sustainable value and even alter business models. In order to gain full advantage of this new technology, however, it is important that managers view blockchain as strategic and integrate it into existing strategic infrastructure and in the future strategic planning. They must perceive long-term value in adopting blockchain and inducting it in organizational strategy planning. From an Information Systems scholarship perspective, it is important for us to explore what changes in skills, processes, and organizational structure are needed to realize the strategic value from blockchain. The objective of this Special Section is to analyze and publicize the building blocks and use of blockchain through exemplars that show its strategic integration into organizations. References 1.Cho, S.; Lee, K.; Cheong, A.; No, W.G.; and Vasarhelyi, M.A. Chain of values: Examining the economic impacts of blockchain on the value-added tax system. Journal of Management Information Systems, 38, 2(2021), in this issue. 2.Liang, T.P.; Kohli, R.; Huang, H.C.; and Li, Z.L. What drives the adoption of the blockchain technology? The fit-viability perspective. Journal of Management Information Systems, 38, 2(2021), in this issue. 3.Sarker, S.; Henningsson, S.; Jensen, T.; and Hedman, J. Blockchain as a strategy for combating corruption in global shipping: An interpretive case study. Journal of Management Information Systems, 38, 2(2021), in this issue. 4.Zhang, W.; Wei, C.P.; Jiang, Q.; Peng, C.H.; and Zhao, J.L. Beyond the block: A novel blockchain-based technical model for long-term care insurance. Journal of Management Information Systems, 38, 2 (2021), in this issue.

Global Perspectives on Information, Communication, and E-Commerce - Briggs, Robert O; Nunamaker Jr, Jay F; Sprague Jr, Ralph H (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2007)
Robert O. Briggs is the Director of Academic Affairs for the Institute for Collaboration Science and Professor of Marketing and Management at the University of Nebraska. He is also an Associate Professor of Systems Engineering at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He earned his Ph.D. in Management and Information Systems from the University of Arizona in 1994. He researches the theoretical foundations of collaboration and applies his findings to the design and deployment of new collaboration technologies and work practices. He is a codeveloper of the Collaboration Engineering discipline, and co-inventor of the ThinkLets design pattern language for collaboration processes. Jay F. Nunamaker Jr. is Regents and Soldwedel Professor of MIS, Computer Science, and Communication and Director of the Center for the Management of Information at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He received his Ph.D. in operations research and systems engineering from Case Institute of Technology, an M.S. and B.S. in engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, and a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University. He received his professional engineer’s license in 1965. In a 2005 journal article in Communications of the AIS, he was recognized as the fourth to the sixth most-productive researcher for the period 1991–2003. Dr. Nunamaker received the LEO Award from the Association of Information Systems (AIS) at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) in Barcelona, Spain, December 2002, and he was elected as a fellow of the AIS in 2000. Ralph H. Sprague is a Professor of Information Technology Management in the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawaii. He has over 40 years of experience in teaching, research, and consulting in the use of computers and information technologies in organizations. His specialties are decision support systems, strategic systems planning, the management of information systems, and electronic document management. He has served as Chairman or Cochairman of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences for the past 30 years. This Special Section focuses on the interplay of many issues arising when people work together to achieve high-value goals on a global scale. In order to build efficient, effective, and useful global systems, we must accommodate the needs of distributed cross-cultural teams. Among other things, we must establish verifiable, yet defensible, online identities that travel securely across geographic and electronic space. We must accommodate myriad genres for data streams and documents. We must find new ways to direct and focus attention, to forge new representations of familiar entities, to reason together, to negotiate and to build consensus, to hold one another accountable. Within this general context, the seven papers in this Special Section address challenges of importance and interest to global information systems (IS) endeavors. Consider, for example, the challenge of managing and controlling global information technology (IT) resources. Madhu T. Rao, Carol V. Brown, and William C. Perkins examine the utility of resource dependence theory in the context of global control and coordination of a distributed IS management function among 54 headquarters—subsidiary pairs spread across 19 countries in their paper, "Host Country Resource Availability and Information System Control Mechanisms in Multinational Corporations: An Empirical Test of Resource Dependence Theory." They report intriguingly mixed findings—some aspects of the theory were borne out in the field, while others were not. The next paper, "Interoperability of E-Government Information Systems: Issues of Identification and Data Sharing," by Benoît Otjacques, Patrik Hitzelberger, and Fernand Feltz, deals with the sensitive legal and administrative challenges to exchanging information about the identities of individuals within a particular national entity and across international borders. This exploratory paper describes the status quo for such practices among 18 of the member states of the European Union. The insights derived here may be useful on a broader scale, as the European Union is a leader in identity protection. Dongsong Zhang, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Lina Zhou, and Xiaolan Fu examine the degree to which global differences affect the efforts of cross-cultural teams in their paper, "The Impact of Individualism--Collectivism, Social Presence, and Group Diversity on Group Decision Making Under Majority Influence." The authors investigate how national culture, social presence, and group diversity may correlate with majority influence in a group decision-making context. The paper reports a study of 183 groups which revealed that the ability of a majority to impose its will on a minority varied significantly by culture. The paper offers useful insights for improving the outcome and the effectiveness of group decision making in cross-cultural environments. Carsten Østerlund, in his paper, "Genre Combinations: A Window into Dynamic Communication Practices," investigates a global phenomenon as he explores the interplay of policy and action in a case study of how organizational members strike a balance between the need for continuity in communicative practices and a need for flexibility in managing a jumble of paper-based and digital IS. Using an emergency room as a rich exemplar, he presents case study data to illustrate that end users often adapt a genre’s media and form in new ways to achieve their ends. John Hulland, Michael R. Wade, and Kersi D. Antia consider an aspect of the global electronic marketplace in their paper, "The Impact of Capabilities and Prior Investments on Online Channel Commitment and Performance," which examines a proposed correlation between prior network infrastructure investments and commitment to online marketing channels. As the paper draws on a resource-based view of the firm, it makes a cross-disciplinary argument to explain the commitment and performance benefits that firms derive from their prior investments. The authors demonstrate the utility of their approach with a survey of 550 online retailers. They report some interesting variation in the degree to which rewards vary unequally across firms. One of the biggest barriers to participation in the global economy is a lack of knowledge about how to conduct collaborative business processes on line. Every aspect of business collaboration incorporates some element of ideation, and many studies have been published about ways to improve idea generation. Bruce A. Reinig, Robert O. Briggs, and Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., in their paper, "On the Measurement of Ideation Quality," report having discovered fundamental flaws in the metrics used to evaluate ideation approaches. The study shows that the same data set would yield three mutually exclusive conclusions depending on which of the metrics was applied. The paper therefore calls into question earlier ideation research based on the biased metrics (including that of the authors). It argues further that the one logically sound metric nonetheless has certain limitations, and proposes an approach to developing new metrics to overcome those constraints. Finally, the line between the global and the local all but vanishes in the paper "Attention Issues in Spatial Information Systems: Directing Mobile Users’ Visual Attention Using Augmented Reality," by Frank Biocca, Charles Owen, Arthur Tang, and Corey Bohil. The paper tackles a special challenge faced by people who must collaborate with respect to three-dimensional objects in three-dimensional space that one or more of the participants do not actually occupy. Collocated team members use gestures, facial expressions, eye gaze, and proximity to direct the attention of their teammates to objects situated in three-dimensional spaces. These same mechanisms are not available to those who do not occupy the same space. This paper presents an elegant and deceptively simple solution to that challenge. Each of the papers in this Special Section grew out work that was nominated for best-paper awards at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). The paper by Biocca, Owen, Tang, and Bohil won the best-paper award for the HICSS track on Collaboration Systems and Technologies in 2006. Each paper presents an important and provocative perspective on how people may succeed as they work together toward their goals. We commend each of them to your reading.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1999)
As you read the first of the papers in the special section on Strategic and Competitive Information Systems that opens this issue, you will see how a successful firm was able to shed its business model and radically transform the structure of its revenue stream. What for? To avoid disintermediation. The fact that the firm has for a number of years used information systems strategically was an enabler; the fact that the CEO's name is eponymous with that of the firm was probably critical. The threat of disintermediation of the current supply-chain participants and the insertion of new intermediaries are some of the effects of electronic commerce. Another effect is the creation of a great variety of electronic marketplaces. The other two papers in the Special Section show the transformation of, respectively, the futures and the securities markets as we move inexorably to electronic trading. The Guest Editors of the Special Section, Eric K. Clemons and Bruce W. Weber, tell you more about the contribution of those papers in their own introduction. In the first paper of the general section, Kathy S. Lassila and James C. Brancheau apply the punctuated equilibrium perspective to the process of organizational appropriation of software packages. The authors identify empirically several possible equilibrium states in this process, only some of which are desirable, and describe the triggers that lead to state transitions. A successful implementation requires tracking of the new application to a high-payoff state. The readers will be rewarded by the suggestions offered here in this regard. Their thinking about the system implementation and utilization will also be expanded. User acceptance of information systems is a vital aspect of their implementation and the Technology Acceptance Model is the lens through which many of us look at this acceptance today. There is a price to pay for the parsimony of this theory, and the authors of the next paper try to establish empirically at least a part of that price. Paul J. Hu, Patrick Y.K. Chau, Olivia R. Liu Sheng, and Kar Yan Tam examine the applicability of the model in the setting of acceptance by physicians of telemedicine technology. Although the authors do find the model applicable, they also find it in need of extension in order to raise the explanatory power, and offer several suggestions in this direction. Even though most system development efforts today include prototyping, there is a dearth of empirical results regarding its contribution to system success. Bill C. Hardgrave, Rick L. Wilson, and Ken Eastman attempt to rectify this situation. In their survey-based exploratory study, these authors identify five variables that affect the success of systems developed with the use of prototyping. The authors propose an initial contingency model for the use of evolutionary or expendable (throw-away) prototyping. Interestingly, it does not include several variables that the vernacular (not based on research) would place there. Using case studies, Han van der Zee and Berend de Jong investigate how Balanced Business Scorecard is and can be used to integrate the planning and implementation of business strategy with those of information technology. The scorecard helps the company go beyond the financial measures of its performance, which are by nature backward-looking, and develop performance measures based on such perspectives as organizational learning or individual business processes. The latter measures are indeed the indicators of future financial performance. The relative richness of the management method affords many points of contact with information technology and thus facilitates its integration into the overall business goal setting and tracking. Raymond R. Panko empirically investigates the contributions of the individual and group code inspections to the testing of spreadsheets. His results indicate that the group effort produces no synergy and can be dropped. More alarmingly, the work concludes that the residual errors (that pass the inspection) make spreadsheets unsafe. By using neural network forecasting models, Steven Walczak shows that emerging equity markets are less efficient than the established ones. He further shows how these models can be used to discover these inefficiencies and gain trading advantage. The point of this work is not, naturally, to be able to gain such advantage. It helps us, rather, to expand our knowledge about the predictive capabilities of neural networks and about the characteristics of capital markets. We are delighted to welcome to our Editorial Board Professor Phillip Ein-Dor of Tel Aviv University. Key words and phrases :

Impact of Knowledge Support on the Performance of Software Process Tailoring - Xu, Peng; Ramesh, Balasubramaniam (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2008)
The use of a well-defined process is a widely recognized approach to increasing quality and productivity in software development. Building software processes from scratch each time is expensive and risky. Therefore, they are often created by tailoring existing processes and standards. Process tailoring is a knowledge-intensive activity. This research explores the link between knowledge support and software process tailoring performance under different levels of tailoring task complexity. It theoretically develops and tests how the fit between knowledge (generalized and contextualized) and software tailoring task complexity influences process tailoring performance. Process tailoring performance is conceptualized in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. The results from an experiment and a protocol analysis show that contextualized knowledge outperforms generalized knowledge in improving tailoring performance, and that such improvement in performance is greater in complex process tailoring tasks when compared to simple tasks.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2007)
Information systems are embedded in every aspect of work, from the operation of the ever more widespread virtual teams to generating new ideas, from the coordination of global corporate operations to managing identities while ensuring privacy across national borders. The Special Section on Global Perspectives on Information, Communication, and E-Commerce, guest-edited by Robert O. Briggs, Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., and Ralph H. Sprague, offers indeed a broad perspective on these subjects. The papers illustrate the broad spectrum of methodological approaches that our field can uniquely and effectively bring to bear on the deployment of information technologies in organizational settings. With the global division of labor progressing apace, proper supply-chain management (SCM) is frequently the key to a firm’s success. The interorganizational information systems (IOS) for SCM underpin this initiative and are, in turn, germane to its success. Tighter IOS integration is frequently assumed to be an unchallenged good. In the first paper of the Journal’s general section, Varun Grover and Khawaja A. Saeed construct a theory-grounded and empirically exercised argument that does challenge it. The researchers are able to tease out the circumstances in which the nature of the product or of the marketplace militates for an IOS-based integration and those in which tight integration should be eschewed. They are consequently in a position to offer fruitful practical advice. Two very different papers address the domain of e-commerce. Weiquan Wang and Izak Benbasat analyze the impact of online recommenders. Recommenders assist e-shoppers with selection among the great variety of alternative products on offer. The deployment and the design options of intelligent recommenders have expanded significantly since their introduction over a decade ago [1]. Through a dialog with the shopper, they have an important role to play in enhancing the capabilities of the selling sites and their customer abilities to navigate the multitude of confusing choices. The present authors focus on the impact of the explanation facilities offered by the recommenders. Their empirical research shows how different types of explanation facilities enhance the different aspects of the potential customers’ trust in the e-tail site. This fine-grained understanding of the role of recommenders can lead to the understanding of the nature of knowledge to be stored in e-commerce systems. As e-commerce grows and options proliferate, recommender systems are certain to assume an expanded role. It is readily apparent that ever more standards are necessary for the flourishing of business-to-business e-commerce. Consortia of leading firms are the frequent source of such standards. The role a consortium plays in the development and adoption of a standard may differ, however. Kexin Zhao, Mu Xia, and Michael J. Shaw use game-theoretic analysis to model and analyze the payoffs to the participating firms from exercising various options. Among the results are the optimal strategic choices for the participant firms under a variety of circumstances, as well as the desirable strategies for the consortia they form. Practical advice follows from the theoretical analysis. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief Reference 1. Ricci, F., and Werthner, H. Introduction to special issue: recommender systems. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 11, 1 (Winter 2006-7), 5-9.

Special Issue: Decision Support and Knowledge-Based Systems - Stohr, Edward A (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1987)

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2011)
AS THE SECOND DECADE OF E COMMERCE IS COMING TO A CLOSE, a textured understanding of the operative factors and their consequences in online markets and online commons is emerging. The three papers opening this issue of JMIS will contribute to this understanding and show how multiple research methodologies of our field can generate further insights in this rapidly evolving domain. In the first of the works, Xinxin Li, Lorin M. Hitt, and Z. John Zhang investigate the influence of online consumer reviews on the pricing strategies for repeat purchase products. Co-creation of value by consumers has emerged as a potent force in the digital realm, changing the traditional role division between producers and consumers. In the presence of autonomous or sponsored co-creation, when the rewards for the created value are of a nonfinancial nature or only indirectly economic, incentives and strategies change [1]. Specific to the present research, consumer reviews reduce information asymmetry between sellers and buyers, which is particularly salient with respect to the products that are purchased repeatedly and can thus be subject to switching. With a formal game-theoretic model, the authors establish how the reviews change the level of consumer informedness and, in turn, affect the price competition in the marketplace. The authors bring into play several factors and interrelationships, which allows them to derive nuanced insights into strategic pricing that can be deployed by sellers in the presence of---highly read---consumer reviews. Much of the consumer surplus in e commerce is derived from the massive assortments of products on offer. As the long tail phenomenon, this fact is seen as the large share of niche products in various markets that could not be so served cost-effectively prior to the infusion of the Internet--Web compound. The insight has been in the need of a theory-driven examination with large data sets. This is what Oliver Hinz, Jochen Eckert, and Bernd Skiera offer here. The empirically based modeling work, deploying a unique data set, offers support for the hypotheses of mutual reinforcement between the demand by consumers for product variety and sellers’ increasing the product variety in their repertoire---but only up to a point, and subject to contingencies. These authors offer another nuanced analysis of the factors that impact the marketplace, including the search technology and the level of e tail use by a given consumer. Wikipedia is one of the glories of co-creation. It is also a product of a highly---if not uniformly---organized, and diverse, collective. The best of the Wikipedia articles are unequaled in the quality of their coverage, analysis, and sourcing. The worst are, well, the worst. The point is that the co-creation ecosystem that has evolved around Wikipedia results in the demonstrable and continuing rise in coverage and, in part, quality. Considering the benefit Wikipedia has conferred on all of us, the study of the antecedents to article quality is of obvious importance. Here, Ofer Arazy, Oded Nov, Raymond Patterson, and Lisa Yeo study the effects of the Wikipedia editor groups on the quality of the articles produced by the group. The empirical work is carried out within the positivist idiom and develops well-grounded theoretical support for the hypotheses it tests. It offers not only the immediate results relevant to its object of study but also a theoretical framework that will undoubtedly be evolved and targeted at other peer products. Information technology (IT) outsourcing has been with us for over 20 years as a large-scale phenomenon. We are still learning. Here, Wen Guang Qu, Alain Pinsonneault, and Wonseok Oh study how industry characteristics influence the extent of IT outsourcing by its firms. The authors identify four relevant characteristics of an industry and, using well-known data sets, relate them to the outsourcing intensity within the industry. The industry-level approach of the study is novel and the results suggest that the level of outsourcing by a firm is preordained to a large extent by the environmental characteristics of the industry it is a part of. This work opens a door to a series of studies that would broaden the focus on the industry-level distribution of IT work. The outcomes of IT-based business process reengineering (BPR) are the object of study by Kemal Altinkemer, Yasin Ozcelik, and Zafer D. Ozdemir. The reputation of BPR has waxed and waned, but the need for sometimes radical process restructuring has not gone away. Using firm-level panel data, the authors find the average performance of the affected firms improved, after the transient of the initiation year. Notably, the grand projects of enterprise-wide BPR are not found superior in their effects on the firm performance to the more narrowly focused functional-level BPR. This is a weighty contribution to our knowledge about the often controversial practice. Privacy concerns, and their self-regulatory and regulatory effects, will increasingly influence the digital domain. To what degree do they affect the balance between the desire for self-disclosure and the perceived need for privacy? Here, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Jinwei Cao, and Andrea Everard offer an empirically based model in the context of instant messaging (IM)---and across two cultures that differ significantly on the Hofstede indicators. The authors choose IM as arguably the most potent self-disclosure technology and ground their work in two well-tested theories. Their results indicate that the privacy concerns will not keep people away from the use of social technologies, but they also suggest that people will seek out technologies that offer control over self-disclosure---to an extent that is culturally conditioned. Software markets are heavily influenced by the presence of network externalities. The authors of the next paper bring this factor into their formal analysis of the competition between the open source software (OSS) and the proprietary software products. The results presented by Hsing Kenneth Cheng, Yipeng Liu, and Qian (Candy) Tang help the competitors establish the incentives for making, or not making, their products compatible with those of the other category, depending on the room left in the market for sales to new customers. A set of strategic choices for the vendors or communities introducing the software emerges from the analysis of the results of the formal modeling. The great variety of products available online is, as mentioned earlier, a great boon to consumers. It is also a source of confusion, suboptimal choices, and balking. Along with other means of supporting consumers’ selection process, some firms offer interactive decision aids, aiming to lead the consumer to a preferred choice. The more traditional aids, focusing on the concrete product features, are now rivaled by aids helping consumers to identify their more abstract needs to be satisfied by the products. Consumer acceptance of the two competing approaches is empirically studied in the work presented here by Clemens F. Köhler, Els Breugelmans, and Benedict G.C. Dellaert. Using construal-level theory, the authors identify the critical role of temporal distance to the consumption in the consumer’s preference for the category of the decision aid. This is of clear help to e tailers---and opens a promising track in the research stream investigating various types of recommenders. Offshore outsourcing is rife with risks that need to be managed. Intercultural settings amplify the inherent risks of arm’s-length relationships. In the next paper of the issue, Radhika P. Jain, Judith C. Simon, and Robin S. Poston examine the issue of vendor silence--- keeping mum about incipient project problems, as well as not actively contributing ideas to a project. In a qualitative study within the context of U.S. outsourcing to India, the major outsourcing target, the authors aim to find the mechanisms through which vendor silence can be mitigated. They do find them in the structural and social mechanisms that act on cultural adaptation. This research deserves to be continued in multiple cross-cultural settings, in order to be generalized into a theory of offshoring across settings differing along specific cultural attributes. The authors of the concluding paper, Yinglei Wang and Nicole Haggerty, develop and validate the construct of individual virtual competence, required to perform effectively in the increasingly virtualized workplaces of today and tomorrow. As a composite of skills, knowledge, and abilities required to work virtually, this competence helps to explain the individual’s perceived performance and work satisfaction. The work offers a useful metric for making decisions in the realm of human resources and a set of capabilities which the individuals can develop to improve their work outcomes in the modern workplace---or a workspace. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief REFERENCE 1. Zwass, V. Co-creation: Toward a taxonomy and an integrated research perspective. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 15, 1 (Fall 2010), 11--48.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1988)

Special Section: Human-Computer Interaction Research in Management Information Systems - Ping, Zhang; Fui-Hoon Nah, Fiona; Benbasat, Izak (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2005)
Ping Zhang is an Associate Professor at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University. She is interested in the broadly defined area of human–computer interaction (HCI) in the organizational and business contexts, and has published in journals such as Behaviour & Information Technology, Communications of the ACM, Communications of the AIS, Computers in Human Behavior, Decision Support Systems, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, International Journal of Human–Computer Studies, Journal of America Society for Information Science and Technology, Journal of the AIS, among others. Her current research interests include intellectual development of HCI research; motivation, flow, affect and emotion in IT use; human-centered IT design and development; and animation and online advertising. She is coeditor (with Dennis Galletta) of two volumes on HCI in MIS in the Advances in Management Information Systems series edited by Vladimir Zwass, and is coauthor (with Dov Te’eni and Jane Carey) of the first HCI textbook for noncomputer science students (Wiley, 2006). Dr. Zhang has received three Best Paper awards (1997, 2001, and 2004), an Excellence in Teaching award (University of Texas at Austin, 1994), and an Outstanding Service award (Association for Information Systems Special Interest Group on Human–Computer Interaction [AIS SIGHCI], 2004). She is an Associate Editor of International Journal of Human–Computer Studies and Communications of the AIS, and a guest coeditor for Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of the AIS, International Journal of Human–Computer Studies, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, and Behaviour & Information Technology. Dr. Zhang is cofounder and the first chair (2001–2004) of AIS SIGHCI. She received her Ph.D. in MIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Computer Science from Peking University, Beijing, China. Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah is an Associate Professor at the College of Business Administration, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her research interests include human–computer interaction, computer-supported collaborative work, knowledge-based and decision support systems, enterprise resource planning, and mobile and ubiquitous commerce. She has published her research in journals such as Communications of the ACM, Journal of the AIS, Communications of the AIS, Behaviour & Information Technology, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, Journal of Computer Information Systems, Information Resources Management Journal, among others. Dr. Nah received the University of Nebraska–Lincoln College of Business Administration Distinguished Teaching award in 2001, the Best Paper award at the 2003 Pre-ICIS Workshop on Human–Computer Interactions (HCI) Research in MIS, and the Maude Hammond Fling Faculty Research Fellowship in 2004. She is an associate editor of Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, an editorial board member of seven other MIS journals, and a guest coeditor for Journal of Management Information Systems, International Journal of Human–Computer Studies, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, Behaviour & Information Technology, Information Resources Management Journal, Business Process Management Journal, Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, and IEEE Transaction on Eduction. Dr. Nah is cofounder and chair (2004–2005) of AIS SIGHCI. She received her Ph.D. in MIS from the University of British Columbia, and M.Sc. and B.Sc. (Honors) in Computer and Information Sciences from National University of Singapore. She was previously on the faculty of the School of Computing, National University of Singapore, and the Krannert School of Management, Purdue University. Izak Benbasat is CANADA Research Chair in Information Technology Management at the Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of Minnesota. Professor Benbasat is a former editor-in-chief of Information Systems Research and, at present, serves as a senior editor of the Journal of the AIS. His current research interests include evaluating user interfaces and Web-based recommendation agents to facilitate business-to-consumer electronic commerce. Human–computer interaction (HCI), or human factors, studies in management information systems (MIS) are concerned with the ways humans interact with information, technologies, and tasks, especially in business, managerial, organizational, and cultural contexts [15]. Although HCI studies in MIS share common interests and concerns with HCI studies in other disciplines, such as computer science, psychology, and ergonomics [11], HCI studies in MIS are also distinctive. An MIS researcher’s perspective affords emphasis and special importance to managerial and organizational contexts by focusing on the analysis of tasks and outcomes at a level that is relevant to organizational performance and effectiveness. The two main distinctive features of MIS when compared to other “homes” of HCI are business application and management orientation [9, 14]. MIS-oriented HCI issues have been addressed since the earliest studies in the MIS discipline. Culnan [4] identified nine factors or subfields in early MIS publications (1972–82). Of these nine, three are related to issues in humans interacting with computers. In a second study of a later period of MIS publications (1980–85), Culnan [5] found the MIS field to be composed of five areas of study, one of which, individual (micro) approaches to MIS design and use, is closely related to HCI. After surveying 50 years of MIS publications in the Management Science journal, Banker and Kauffman [1] identified HCI as one of five main research streams in MIS and predicted that interest in HCI research will resurge. The prediction of the resurgence has already taken place. MIS scholars’ interest in HCI has greatly increased in recent years and HCI has been gaining importance in the MIS discipline. For example, a large number of MIS scholars have self-reported their research interests in HCI-related issues and in teaching HCI-related topics [15]. HCI courses are also offered in many MIS programs [2, 3, 8]. HCI is recognized as an important topic in the most recent model curriculum for the Master in Information Systems majors [7]. Both the total numbers and percentages of HCI studies published in primary MIS journals have increased over recent years [13]. There are two forthcoming volumes on HCI research in MIS [6, 12] that are a part of the Advances in Management Information Systems series (mesharpe.com/amis.htm). Major MIS conferences, such as the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Americas Conferences on Information Systems (AMCIS), Pacific Asia Conferences on Information Systems (PACIS), and European Conferences on Information Systems (ECIS), have been paying attention to HCI studies for many years. Most of them have started to set up specifically designated HCI tracks (ICIS started this in 2004, AMCIS in 2002, PACIS in 2005, ECIS in 2006, and HICSS is targeting 2007). There is a workshop devoted to HCI research in the MIS discipline that started in 2002—the Pre-ICIS annual Workshop on HCI Research in MIS. Finally, an official organization of HCI in MIS, the AIS Special Interest Group on HCI (SIGHCI), was established in 2001 to promote and support HCI research, teaching, and practice in MIS [10]. Manuscript Selection Process for Special Section This Special Section is the fifth in a series of special sections or issues resulting from meetings organized and sponsored by AIS SIGHCI, including HCI tracks/minitracks at AMCIS and the Pre-ICIS workshops on HCI research in MIS. The earlier four special issues include International Journal of Human–Computer Studies (Vol. 59, No. 4, October 2003, based on AMCIS 2002), Journal of Association for Information Systems (January and March, 2004, based on the first and Pre-ICIS HCI in MIS Workshop 2002), Behaviour & Information Technology (Vol. 23, No. 3, May–June 2004, based on AMCIS 2003), and International Journal of Human Computer Interaction (Vol. 19, No. 1, 2005, based on AMCIS 2004). Future foreseeable special issues include those in the Journal of the AIS (to be published in 2006 and 2007, based on the third and fourth Pre-ICIS workshops on HCI research in MIS in 2004 and 2004, respectively) and in the International Journal of Human–Computer Studies (forthcoming in 2006, based on AMCIS 2005 and PACIS 2005). The papers for this Special Section are the expanded and revised versions of the best papers from the Second Pre-ICIS Workshop on HCI Research in MIS, December 2003, Seattle, Washington. A total of 42 papers were submitted to the workshop, of which 17 were accepted for presentations. Nine of the 17 papers were selected for consideration in this Special Section. The authors of these nine papers expanded their manuscripts based on feedback from the workshop reviews and comments from the participants, and enhanced the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical content of their papers. Each of the resulting manuscripts was then reviewed by one original reviewer from the workshop and two or three new reviewers. After three rounds of rigorous peer review and editorial feedback from the Special Section Guest Editors, four papers were accepted for this Special Section of JMIS. Preview of the Papers in the Special Section The Special Section contains four papers that illustrate some of the many interesting current HCI issues and concerns within the MIS discipline. The papers evolve around the theme of decision making in information technology (IT) use and adoption. The first three papers examine interface issues and their impact on decision making and problem solving. The last paper examines the impact of task type on decision making relating to adoption of mobile technology for commerce. The first paper, entitled “Involvement and Decision-Making Performance with a Decision Aid: The Influence of Social Multimedia, Gender, and Playfulness,” is coauthored by Traci J. Hess, Mark A. Fuller, and John Mathew. The study explored how multimedia vividness and the use of computer-based social cues can influence involvement with technology and decision-making outcomes by taking into account two individual differences—gender and computer playfulness. Findings indicate that personality similarity between the user and the decision aid as well as computer playfulness result in increased involvement with the decision aid. In addition, women reported higher levels of involvement with the decision aid. Increased levels of multimedia vividness are found to have a contradictory effect, with animation actually reducing involvement with the decision aid. In the second paper, entitled “How Presentation Flaws Affect Perceived Site Quality, Trust, and Intention to Purchase from an Online Store,” Andrea Everard and Dennis F. Galletta studied the impact of three types of presentation flaws (errors, poor style, and incompleteness) on users’ perceived quality of and trust in e-commerce Web sites, as well as their intentions to purchase from the sites. The highest perceived quality was reported for Web sites without flaws, and a pattern of diminishing returns was observed with each subsequent flaw perceived. The findings indicate that errors, poor style, and incompleteness influence perceived quality via the perception of these flaws, and perceived quality influences trust, which, in turn, affects purchase intentions. Because it is the perception of flaws on Web sites rather than the actual presence of flaws that affects users’ quality assessments, it is important for Web stores to pay attention to how the features of Web sites are perceived by consumers. In the paper “Investigating Coherence and Multimedia Effects of a Technology-Mediated Collaborative Environment,” Andrew Gemino, Drew Parker, and Adrienne Olnick Kutzschan applied the cognitive theory of multimedia learning to assess the coherence and multimedia design principles of a technology-mediated collaborative environment. The study examined the impact of the context relevance of graphics embedded into the background of a collaborative interface. The results indicate that including context-relevant graphics can enhance knowledge acquisition, whereas including irrelevant graphical information neither adversely affects nor fosters acquisition. The results support the coherence and multimedia principles of the cognitive theory of multimedia learning in the technology-mediated collaborative environment. Despite the many information systems studies on user acceptance of various technologies, few studies emphasized the role and impact of task types on user acceptance. Xiaowen Fang, Susy Chan, Jacek Brzezinski, and Shuang Xu addressed just such an issue in their paper “Moderating Effects of Task Type on Wireless Technology Acceptance.” Three task categories were identified in the wireless context: (1) general tasks that do not involve transactions and gaming, (2) gaming tasks, and (3) transactional tasks. A validated conceptual model for wireless technology adoption indicates that task type moderates the effects of four possible determinants: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived playfulness, and perceived security. User intention to perform general tasks that do not involve transactions and gaming is influenced by perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, user intention to play games is affected by perceived playfulness, and user intention to carry out transactions is influenced by perceived usefulness and perceived security. The study results have practical implications to designing wireless devices to better suit specific task types. Acknowledgments: The Guest Editors thank the Editor-in-Chief, Vladimir Zwass, for his support in bringing this Special Section to fruition. They appreciate the cooperation of the authors who worked so diligently to produce their best work. They are indebted to the reviewers who helped to develop these manuscripts into their best form. The reviewers were Henri Barki, Dinesh Batra, Traci Carte, Ron Cenfetell, Patrick Chau, Jane Gravill, Zhenghui Jiang, Paul Lowry, Jiye Mao, Lorne Olfman, Judy Olson, Jonathan Palmer, Jeff Parson, Tom Roberts, Terry Shaft, Mark Silver, Diane Strong, James Teng, Peter Todd, Lai Lai Tung, Viswanath Venkatesh, Susan Wiedenbeck, Wei Zhang, and Ilze Zigurs. References 1. Banker, R.D., and Kauffman, R.J. The evolution of research on information systems: A fiftieth-year survey of the literature in management science. Management Science, 50, 3 (2004), 281–298. 2. Carey, J.; Galletta, D.; Kim, J.; Te’eni, D.; Wildermuth, B.; and Zhang, P. The role of HCI in IS curricula: A call to action. Communications of the AIS, 13, 23 (2004), 357–379. 3. Chan, S.S.; Wolfe, R.J.; and Fang, X. Issues and strategies for integrating HCI in masters level MIS and e-commerce programs. International Journal of Human–Computer Studies, 59, 4 (2003), 497–520. 4. Culnan, M.J. The intellectual development of management information systems, 1972–1982: A co-citation analysis. Management Science, 32, 2 (1986), 156–172. 5. Culnan, M.J. Mapping the intellectual structure of MIS 1980–1985: A co-citation analysis. MIS Quarterly, 11, 3 (1987), 341–353. 6. Galletta, D., and Zhang, P. (eds.). Human–Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems—Applications. Advances in Management Information Systems, vol. 5. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2006. 7. Gorgone, J.T.; Gray, P.; Stohr, E.A.; Valacich, J.S.; and Wigand, R.T. MSIS 2006 curriculum review. Communications of the AIS, 15, Article 30 (2005), 544–554. 8. Kutzschan, A.O., and Webster, J. HCI as MIS. In P. Zhang and D. Galletta (eds.), Human–Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems—Foundations. Advances in Management Information Systems, vol. 4. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2006. 9. Nah, F.F.-H.; Zhang, P.; and McCoy, S. Editorial introduction: HCI in MIS. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 19, 1 (2005), 3–6. 10. Zhang, P. AIS SIGHCI three-year report. AIS SIGHCI Newsletter, 3, 1 (July 2004), 2–6 (available at sigs.aisnet.org/sighci/). 11. Zhang, P., and Dillon, A. HCI and MIS: Shared concerns. International Journal of Human–Computer Studies, 59, 4 (2003), 397–402. 12. Zhang, P., and Galletta, D. (eds.). Human–Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems—Foundations. Advances in Management Information Systems, vol. 4. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2006. 13. Zhang, P., and Li, N. The intellectual development of human–computer interaction research: A critical assessment of the MIS literature (1990–2002). Journal of the AIS, 6, 11 (November 2005), 227–292. 14. Zhang, P.; Nah, F.F.-H.; and Preece, J. HCI studies in MIS. Behaviour & Information Technology, 23, 3 (2004), 147–151. 15. Zhang, P.; Benbasat, I.; Carey, J.; Davis, F.; Galletta, D.; and Strong, D. Human–computer interaction research in the MIS discipline. Communications of the AIS, 9, 20 (2002), 334–355.

Special Issue: Information Technology and Organizational Governance: The IT Governance Cube - Tiwana, Amrit; Konsynski, Benn; Venkatraman, N (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2013)
AMRIT TIWANA is a professor of MIS in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. He serves as a senior editor at Information Systems Research and on the boards of Journal of Management Information Systems, Strategic Management Journal, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. He has also served on MIS Quarterly's editorial board. His work on IT governance has appeared in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Strategic Management Journal, Decision Sciences, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering, California Management Review, and other journals. BENN KONSYNSKI is the George S. Craft Distinguished University Professor of Business Administration in the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. He has held faculty positions at the University of Arizona and Harvard Business School. He is the author of numerous research publications, and served as adviser and board member on public and private corporations. N. VENKATRAMAN is the David J. McGrath Jr. Professor in Management at the School of Management of Boston University. He held faculty positions at MIT Sloan School and London Business School. His research centers on the network perspectives on strategy for the digital age. He has been recognized as one of the top 25 cited researchers in management over the past 25 years by Journal of Management, Strategic Management Journal, and Thompson/ISI. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT) HAS SPAWNED PREVIOUSLY INFEASIBLE FORMS of organizational governance, and these new logics have simultaneously amplified the need for effective IT governance. For example, contemporary platform ecosystems (e.g., Apple's iOS community and Android's developer network), open source development (e.g., Ubuntu Linux), knowledge creation platforms (e.g., Starbucks' idea-generation wiki and Wikipedia), and massively distributed self-organizing innovation networks (e.g., Innocentive and Kickstarter) were previously unfeasible. These emergent governance arrangements have altered the conventional notions of organizational boundaries and have ushered in network-forms different from those found in traditional industry configurations. How organizations govern their IT activities has similarly evolved into an intricate mosaic of dispersed decision rights spanning organizations, entities, and institutions-often involving a multiplicity of stakeholders. Such IT governance arrangements defy conventional dichotomizations such as centralization/decentralization or insourcing/outsourcing of IT activities that were historically pervasive in the IT governance literature. A complementary stream of work on IT implementation has contributed major insights into the successful implementation of systems, yet limited attention has been directed to how organizations must govern the use of successfully implemented systems to realize their latent value. The goal of this Special Issue is to expand the scope of the research conversation to encompass IT- enabled governance of new organizing logics, the symbiotic relationship between IT and organizational governance, and to foster new theory development at the interface of IT and organizational governance. The IT Governance Cube as a Conversant for Spotting Theoretical Blind Spots THE IT GOVERNANCE CUBE in Figure 1 offers a simple framework for broadening the research conversation. It encompasses three dimensions along which IT governance research can be positioned. The IT Governance Cube is intended as a shared prop-a conversant-in our collective conversation of what we already know as a discipline (the shaded cells in the cube) and fertile directions in which our research conversation can progress (the unshaded cells in the cube). (A study can simultaneously occupy more than one cell in the cube.) 1. Who is governed? This dimension represents the scope or expansiveness of governance and roughly corresponds to the unit of analysis. This can be a discrete IT application or project, the firm or the IT function within a firm, or an ecosystem of firms. The ecosystem can either be the increasingly observed ecosystems consisting of large numbers of firms (sometimes numbering in the hundreds of thousands such as in Apple's iOS ecosystem), crowdsourcing and product co-creation networks, and multifirm supply chains and value chains, or dyadic segments of larger networks such as interfirm sourcing arrangements. The existing body of research on IT governance has focused primarily on governance of IT at the firm level and in dyadic interfirm sourcing arrangements. However, less attention has been directed toward governance of individual IT applications and discrete IT services, and miniscule attention to large-scale ecosystems of firms and systems. Organizational arrangements that fall between the artificial cells along this axis also offer promising opportunities for theory development. This includes IT governance in pluralistic organizational arrangements that simultaneously exploit the advantages of vertical integration and outsourcing by doing both, or arrangements that keep some innovation activity in-house but shift other parts to complementor markets. 2. What is governed? The second dimension pertains to whether what is governed is IT artifacts such as hardware and software, the content of those artifacts (e.g., data and information), or the stakeholders involved in producing and consuming them. The existing body of work focuses largely on the IT artifacts and stakeholders, with their content having received the least attention. As we enter the era of big data and analytics and the strategic assumption of information scarcity gets replaced by information abundance, theory development on this facet becomes increasingly crucial to understanding how firms can accomplish sense making of massive amounts of real-time data. 3. How is it governed? The third dimension represents the mechanisms used to govern. These can be the allocation of decision rights, formal and informal control mechanisms, or the use of architecture itself as a mechanism for nonovert control. Three broad types of problems remain understudied along this dimension of the IT Governance Cube. First, prior IT governance research has focused primarily on control mechanisms and to a lesser degree on decision rights, and often at the project level. Largely overlooked is the role of architecture, which itself can be a subtle, nonovert, and less costly form of control. Theory development about the role of IT architecture as a coordination device is especially crucial in massively distributed organizational arrangements where conventional coordination devices such as hierarchical authority do not readily scale and traditional formal and informal control mechanisms can be too costly to implement. Second, the dynamics of control evolution and their oscillation between different modes (e.g., formal and informal) remain understudied. Similarly, configurations of control mechanisms used in massively distributed organizational arrangements such as global expertise networks and product co-creation communities, and their antecedents and consequences, warrant further attention. Third, more nuanced conceptualizations of IT governance as partitioning of different classes of decision rights among multiple stakeholders within and across conventional firm boundaries, and the dynamics of IT governance evolution (e.g., temporal oscillation between extremes of centralization and decentralization) warrant further attention. Figure 1 offers only a starting point for theoretically expanding the IT governance conversation; we caution scholars against elevating it into a theoretical straitjacket. Figure 1. The IT Governance Cube Note: The shaded cells represent our existing disciplinary knowledge of IT governance, the circled numbers represent the contributions of the papers in this special issue, and the remaining cells represents unexplored theoretical territory. Antecedents and Consequences: Theory Development Through Permutation FIGURE 2 SUMMARIZES A LEGO-LIKE antecedent-governance-consequence framework for applying the IT Governance Cube as a conversant for future research. We urge scholars to begin in the middle in their theory development efforts, that is, first pick a focal cell in the cube before thinking of antecedents and consequences in their nomological networks. The same antecedents and consequences with a different cell in the middle can result a distinctively different set of theoretical insights. On the left-hand side of Figure 2 are three illustrative, broad categories of antecedents of IT governance. These encompass properties of ITs, properties of the organizations where they are deployed, and properties of their broader environment. We envision two broad sets of research opportunities. First, while these antecedents have been extensively studied in prior IT governance studies, the focus has largely been the cell at the intersection of IT artifacts and firm or project level studies that are shaded in Figure 1. We believe that shifting the focus to other cells can offer entirely new theoretical insights that cumulatively stand on the shoulders of the prior body of work. Second, the alignment and temporal coevolution of properties of IT, organizations, and their environment has received limited attention. The widespread but implicit assertion in the extant literature that IT and organizational properties are distinct drivers of how IT is governed should therefore be replaced by the assertion that they are inseparably intertwined. Future studies that address this niche can offer new theoretical insights into the emergence and the consequences of misfits among properties of IT (e.g., architectural modularity or interface openness), organizational properties, and environmental dynamics. On the right-hand side of Figure 2 are some consequences of IT governance. These have historically encompassed classical outcomes derived from organization theory: efficiency, effectiveness, flexibility, and more recently ambidexterity. While these are entirely appropriate, overattention to them also blinds us to much larger opportunities for moving beyond our reference disciplines and for reciprocating with substantively new theoretical contributions to them. We see three types of opportunities to progress beyond our reference disciplines and create new theory distinctively original to the information systems discipline. These encompass focusing on innovation partitioning, orchestration, or evolutionary dynamics as the focal consequences in our nomological networks about IT governance. First, IT is increasingly the enabler of new organizational forms such as ecosystems and distributed interfirm networks. Its application enables disruptively new forms of innovation partitioning-division of innovation labor-among individuals, departments, and firms. For example, platform ecosystems (e.g., iOS and Android) and open source projects (e.g., Linux) use a modularized software foundation that is instrumental in dividing up innovation work among tens of thousands of autonomous firms. Similarly, IT also enables the repartitioning of decision rights across organizational boundaries in previously unimaginable ways. A promising consequence for incorporating in our nomological networks of IT governance is therefore innovation partitioning and self-organization among collaborating actors along the different levels of the Who dimension in Figure 1. Second, the foundational assertion of a principal-agent relationship is not necessarily true in emerging organizational forms such as platform ecosystems. In such settings, orchestration, coordination, and integration of the work of many autonomous parties supplant received notions of authority and control. (We use the word orchestration to refer to influencing those that one does not control.) Control in such settings can also be bidirectional rather than from a principal to an agent. These fundamental shifts observed in practice offer fertile research opportunities. Third, we must expand the conversation to include dynamic and evolutionary organizational consequences of IT governance. These can encompass organizational survival and mortality, organizational resilience, capacity to morph and evolve, competitive durability, IT-facilitated envelopment of adjacent markets, and mutation of existing firm offerings into new ones. However, the unexplored white boxes in Figure 1 must not be replaced by theoretical black boxes. Particularly close attention is warranted in such permutative theory development to processes and mechanisms that offer causal explanations that will remain necessary to progress beyond the predominantly predictive focus of IT governance studies to a scientifically necessary explanatory role as well. Figure 2. Theory Construction Through Permutation Positioning of the Papers in the Special Issue THE SPECIAL ISSUE RECEIVED 49 SUBMISSIONS, of which five papers appear here. These papers encompass diverse cells in Figure 1 as shown in the circled numbers. Three papers use qualitative methods, two focus on IT services, and their authors span globally dispersed academic institutions and businesses, mirroring the globe-spanning, method-agonistic strengths of our research community. Winkler and Brown's study occupies the circled Cell 1 in Figure 1. The paper examines the partitioning of decision rights at the application level using data from 207 firms, contributing new theoretical insights into how such governance differs across traditional software applications (which they call "on-premise applications") and those delivered as a service. A noteworthy feature of the study is the conceptualization of IT decisions rights to encompass both IT authority and responsibility. Di Tullio and Staples (Cell 2 in Figure 1) explore the control of 184 open source projects to offer nuanced new insights into how they influence coordination and the development climate relative to their influence used in in-house and outsourced software projects in prior research. This paper therefore expands the theoretical conversation to orchestration-like consequences. The next two papers introduce complementary ideas that pertain to the dynamic nature of governance in interfirm settings. The paper by Huber, Fischer, Dibbern, and Hirschheim (Cell 3 in Figure 1) uses case data from four outsourced software projects to develop new theoretical insights into the dynamic and temporally oscillating nature of the complementarity and substitution between contractual governance and relational governance. Cao, Mohan, Ramesh, and Sarkar (Cell 4 in Figure 1) complement Huber et al.'s paper using an in-depth case study to develop a middle-range evolutionary theory to help explain how vacillation between relational and contractual governance allows organizations to achieve greater ambidexterity in outsourced IT services. The paper by Tallon, Ramirez, and Short (Cell 5 in Figure 1) uses data from 30 organizations in 17 industries to theoretically develop the notion of information governance as a complement and extension to the historical focus of prior IT governance studies on IT artifacts such as hardware and software systems. This paper therefore expands the body of IT governance research along the What dimension, emphasizing the governance of what flows through IT artifacts. We believe that this is timely given the rise of big data and analytics-driven decision making in contemporary organizations. The contributions of the many anonymous reviewers were instrumental in shaping the papers in the Special Issue. We are grateful to members of the Guest Editorial Board of the Special Issue, which included Andrew Burton-Jones, Ashley Bush, Samer Faraj, J.J. Hsieh, Jerry Luftman, Arvind Malhotra, Gautam Ray, T. Ravichandran, Mani Subramani, Huseyin Tanriverdi, and Eric van Heck.

Special Issue: Financial Information Systems and the Fintech Revolution - Gomber, Peter; Kauffman, Robert J; Parker, Chris; Weber, Bruce W (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2018)
PETER GOMBER (gomber@wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de) holds the Chair of e-Finance, Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, at Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany. He acquired his Ph.D. from the Institute of Information Systems at the University of Giessen, Germany. He is co-chairman and member of the Board of the E-Finance Lab, an industry-academic partnership between Frankfurt and Darmstadt Universities, and leading industry partners that include Deutsche Börse, IBM, DZ Bank, Finanz Informatik, and FactSet. He is a member of the Exchange Council of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and the Consultative Working Group of the Secondary Market Standing Committee of the European Securities and Markets Authority. His academic work focuses on digital finance and fintech, information systems in financial markets, market microstructure theory, regulatory impact on financial markets, and innovation in electronic trading systems. He serves as editor in chief of EFL Quarterly and associate editor of several other journals. His research publications have appeared in Journal of Business Economics, Journal of Information Technology, Decision Support Systems, European Financial Management, and many other journals, research monographs, and conference proceedings. ROBERT J. KAUFFMAN (rkauffman@smu.edu.sg) is a professor of information systems, School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University (SMU). He holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. He serves as associate dean (Faculty), and previously was associate dean (Research) at SMU. He was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Center for Digital Strategies, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth; the W.P. Carey Chair in Information Systems at Arizona State, and was professor and director of the MIS Research Center at the University of Minnesota, while chairing the Department of Information and Decision Science. His research focuses on technology and strategy, the economics of information technology, financial services and technology, managerial decision-making, and e-commerce. His work has appeared in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Telecom Policy, Decision Sciences, Management Science, Review of Economics and Statistics, and many other journals. He is editor in chief of Electronic Commerce Research and Applications. He has served in senior leadership roles for conferences and has funded industry research projects, and has also served on research review panels in Canada, Singapore, the Netherlands, Finland, Hong Kong, and the United States. CHRIS PARKER (chris.parker@psu.edu; corresponding author) is an assistant professor of supply chain management in the Department of Supply Chain and Information Systems in the Smeal College of Business of Pennsylvania State University. He also works with the Information Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) Consortium, housed in the College of Communications. He earned his Ph.D. at the London Business School in the Management Science and Operations Department. His research addresses questions at the interface of operations management and information systems. His publications appear in Management Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Transportation Science. BRUCE W. WEBER (bweber@udel.edu) is dean of the Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware, where he is a professor of business administration and an affiliated faculty member of the Institute for Financial Services Analytics. He serves on the Advisory Council of the SWIFT Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in decision sciences from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously a professor of information management and Subject Area Chair for Management Science and Operations at London Business School, and on the faculty of the Stern School of Business at New York University, and Baruch College, City University of New York, where he was the founding director of the Subotnick Financial Services Center. His work evaluates the economic advantages of digital markets, and highlights the new challenges facing traders, managers, and regulators in an increasingly computerized financial services industry. His research on information technology strategy, financial sector computerization, and compliance systems has been published in leading academic journals and has been cited in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. His books are The Equity Trader Course (Wiley, 2006) and Mastering Equity Trading through Simulation (Wiley, 2010). This Special Issue of the Journal of Management Information Systems was developed to build new foundations for research in the interdisciplinary space of the Fintech Revolution. Today, it seems that all areas of financial services are touched by the technological forces that have led to new entrepreneurship, unbridled innovation, and significant growth in interest by venture capital firms to become involved. This time around though, it is not the dot-coms or e-commerce. Instead, it is the technological transformation of banking, securities trading, and other financial services as we have known them in the past: new visions of services and customer centricity, with bright prospects for controlling costs and supporting profitability. There are new capabilities that reflect digital convergence and disintermediation, new forms of money such as bitcoin and ethereum, and the extension of financial services to previously unbanked consumers and markets. In October 2017, Venture Scanner (www.venturescanner.com) identified 2,307 new companies in the “Financial Technology” category they track, among which 1,490 in 16 different categories across 64 different countries have raised US$75.4 billion in venture capital funding. Some of the focal categories that are represented include: lending, microfinance and crowdfunding, retail and institutional investments, personal finance, smart contract and distributed ledger innovations, and payments and remittances. Other niche areas are represented as well: equity finance, banking infrastructure, consumer banking, blockchain project platforms, open application programming interfaces (APIs), and financial research. Simultaneously, many other practices that are unique to financial services are undergoing fundamental changes. They include: growth toward mobile payments at scale; diminution in the use of cash in different nations and world regions; changes in how international trade is financed based on new ways to achieve stakeholder informedness in supply chain management through information technology (IT); and the use of transaction filters to comply with political sanctions on the movement of money in the global financial system. Also included are the growth of new forms of algorithmic and high-frequency trading; cross-border equity trading, clearing, and settlement; and global portfolio management made possible by regional trading networks. There are also emerging technologies that are creating new opportunities for innovative applications: blockchain-based ledgers between trading counterparties; new encoding capabilities for transaction tracing; and data mining, machine learning, and artificial intelligence for pattern recognition and knowledge discovery. Given these fundamental changes in the financial services industry and our motivation to explore the latest research that represents some of these areas in the Fintech Revolution, we reached out to researchers with various backgrounds and interests in the financial technology arena, to submit articles for this Special Issue of the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS). We received more than 60 submissions in total, of which 75 percent dealt with issues that were well-connected to the phenomena and research innovations that we hoped to bring to JMIS readers’ attention. In the end, we accepted six papers from the original submissions that met our criteria for Fintech Revolution relevance, high-quality scholarship, and meaningful results to build foundations in this emerging area of research. The Special Issue opens with its lead article, which asks: “How Does Social Media Impact Bitcoin Value? A Test of the Silent Majority Hypothesis,” by Feng Mai, Zhe Shan, Qing Bai, Xin (Shane) Wang, and Roger H.L. Chiang. The emergence of bitcoin has brought along with it a firestorm of business issues, skepticism about whether there is a “bitcoin bubble” or new innovation-associated market adjustments, and whether bitcoin truly functions as a form of digital money, or instead, it works more like equities—only without any underlying assets on which to be able to assert that there is some intrinsic value present. We have seen the US$480 million hacking-driven demise of the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange in Japan, along with the on-again-off-again willingness of China to permit bitcoin exchanges to operate within its borders, and the European Parliament’s reluctance to allow any totally anonymous cryptocurrencies to be exchanged within the borders of its 28 nation states. The authors assess what drives the value of bitcoin, which is many times more volatile than most stock prices and foreign exchange rate pairs. They specify a number of hypotheses, and through a blend of machine-based methods and explanatory econometric analysis, assess the extent to which the Twitter sentiments of the larger number of active posters—their vocal majority—or the smaller number of occasional posters—their silent majority—typically influence bitcoin prices to a greater extent. The methods involve sentiment textual analytics and vector error correction modeling estimation. They also assess whether blog forum posts with more extended opinions expressed are more influential than very brief Twitter sentiments. They report that social media sentiment, especially the sentiment of the silent majority—the Silent Majority Hypothesis—seems to affect bitcoin prices to a greater extent than that of the vocal minority and that blog posts are more influential than tweets via Twitter. “Cheap talk” is communication between economic agents that can be delivered and received between them without cost. Typically, such communication does not affect the economic outcome of their interactions. However, economist Joseph Farrell ([1], p. 186; emphasis added), in an article called “Talk Is Cheap” in the American Economic Review, wrote that “the standard theory of signaling seems to suggest that cheap talk should be uninformative, but this is misleading: cheap talk can sometimes convey information and affect real (payoff-relevant) actions.” Related to this background theory, the second article in the issue is by Jennifer J. Xu and Michael Chau, who explore “Cheap Talk? The Impact of Lender-Borrower Communication on Peer-to-Peer Lending Outcomes.” The authors observe, through empirical analysis of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms, that cheap talk may lead to rational herding behavior among P2P loan funders. They rely on a rich data set that permits two-way communication between borrowers and investors to see the extent to which richer social communication improves funding for borrowers and supports better loan payback rates. They report that borrower responses do more to enhance their funding success than lender comments and questions, and that such communication is more important when borrowers have weaker credit ratings. Lenders also seem to influence one another based on whether they share positive or negative comments, and the richness of their communication. They further report that lending performance in payback rate terms is not able to be predicted based on how much borrowers and lenders engage in direct social interaction on the P2P lending platform. Yang Jiang, Yi-Chun (Chad) Ho, Xiangbin Yan, and Yong Tan contributed the third article, entitled “Investor Platform Choice: Herding, Platform Attributes, and Regulations.” They report on an empirical study they conducted on the extent to which P2P lending exhibits patterns that can be explained by rational herding theory. These involve the effects of observational learning, and the various kinds of information transmissions that go to market participants. This work also considers the effects of social interactions at the platform level of analysis; in particular, to gauge the extent to which platform investors tend to follow the lending actions of others who offered loans before them. The authors analyzed a unique information on 127 P2P lending platforms via a large Chinese-language market aggregator’s website. In addition to numerous explanatory and control variables, the authors specified two measures of herding behavior: the cumulative number of investors who lend funds during a week, and the average cumulative amount per investor during the same week. The authors found evidence that herding occurs in P2P lending at the platform level, as it does at the loan-listing level, as other authors have shown. They employed a hierarchal regression model, and also showed that the previous lending behavior of other prior investors does indeed influence their choice of platform for subsequent loans. In addition, their results further point to the importance of government regulations as a diminishing moderator of P2P loan herding, and that a larger market share for a platform and a longer time since its implementation tend to heighten the extent to which investor herding on loan-making is observed. The fourth article is “The Role of Provision Points in Online Crowdfunding,” authored by Gordon Burtch, Yili Hong, and De Liu. An important theoretical foundation for studies on the new fintech issues is similar to what has been relevant for financial markets, auction operations, and the innovations associated with business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce in the past: market mechanism design theory. This research related to crowdfunding on the Internet studies the provision point mechanism. The authors refer to this as an “all-or-nothing” fundraising scheme, although overfunding is often possible with these mechanisms. The theoretical relevance to crowdfunding platforms is threefold. First, when there is a predetermined fixed target for the capital an entrepreneur raises, this takes away the impetus for investors to gauge the likely return they will receive on the basis of how much funding interest there is in the market as a signal for likely success. Second, when the funds raised fall short of what an entrepreneur has requested, all of the investors are protected because their funds will not be provided to the entrepreneur, which protects them from loss. Third, there also is a positive contribution externality that incentivizes them to more generously contribute, since they are protected as a group. The authors employ data from a crowdfunding platform that makes the inclusion of a provision point a design choice. Thus, it was possible for them to extract empirical evidence to show the effects of this mechanism design feature at different stages in a crowdfunding campaign. The authors report that a provision point limitation, in the presence of greater prior capital accumulation, was not associated with greater follow-on investments. This research suggests that the inclusion of a provision point in a crowdfunding campaign can mitigate undesirable rational herding behavior or informational cascades that diminish the quality of the market. The fifth article is “The Innovation Mechanisms of Fintech Start-Ups: Insights from SWIFT’s Innotribe Competition.” The authors, Daniel Gozman, Jonathan Liebenau, and Jonathan Mangan, won a funded research competition run by SWIFT Institute in London, to study the business models of 402 fintech start-ups in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, based on their access to a global database of entrepreneurial entrants. The authors sought to study the characteristics that the start-up firms exhibited, in order to determine the key drivers of firms, their markets, and innovation activities that bring them longer-term success, and a sustainable and profitable business model. For this research on entrepreneurial firms, the authors applied technology ecosystem theory, and its key elements of underlying technologies and components, fintech services and products, and enabling business infrastructures, to create a foundation for their analysis of firm capabilities. They employed cluster analysis to match start-ups to different clusters defined by their characteristic business activities. They also used case study methods to analyze the Innotribe firms’ business models, in terms of a number observable mechanisms that are present in their business models. They include: automation of processes and hybridization of business products and services; financialization of various aspects of their operating capabilities for their clients; disintermediation or reintermediation actions related to the market in which they compete, creating new levels of competition; enhancement of client access to core processes and services involving financial services; and finally hybridization of multiple traditional financial services that are brought together so that their synergy results in new and innovative capabilities. The authors report on a number of minicases of fintech start-ups that have demonstrated how to leverage new competitive and cooperative strategies, which enabled the firms to acquire venture capital funding and niche opportunities in a highly complex global marketplace for fintech innovation. They further note the generalizability of their approach and findings to other emerging component, service, and business infrastructure innovations in the insurtech (insurance technology) and regtech (regulatory technology) ecosystems. The sixth article of this Special Issue was contributed by Erol Kazan, Chee-Wee Tan, Eric T.K. Lim, Carsten Sørensen, and Jan Damsgaard, who have done a study on “Disentangling Digital Platform Competition: The Case of UK Mobile Payment Platforms.” Their research presents a new taxonomy of mobile payment platforms, that leverages the authors’ insights about value creation and value delivery architectures—new constructs that characterize the capabilities of mobile payment technology platforms. The authors’ central argument is that competitive advantage is created and sustained through the architectural configurations a fintech firm is able to implement for its marketplace. The authors examine strategic industry groups of firms in industrial economies, as well as those that exhibit network links of different kinds within them. They employ an interpretive multiple case study approach that blends exploratory and explanatory approaches, as well as theory and interviewing methods, to produce insights on key how-and-why questions about mobile payment firm success in the complex mobile payment ecosystem of the UK. The authors’ analysis work enables them to characterize three different modes of access to mobile payment platforms: the direct access, indirect access, and open access approaches. They further explain the presence of three different platform competition strategies: the germination, orchestration, and transformation strategies for platform architecture positioning differentiation. The authors characterize their main contribution of new technology strategy and management knowledge as identifying how mobile payment technology platforms appropriate value in the marketplace. For companies with single-firm integrative approaches that are able to exert control on their own value-creation architectures, their mobile payment platform architectures are able to appropriate value by shielding their business activities from potential third-party competitors. In contrast, those that have more integratable, interorganizational mobile payment platform architectures tend to rely on extracting value from federated business networks, with reciprocal promotion and synergistic innovation. This Special Issue’s seventh and final article, by the guest editors, Peter Gomber, Robert J. Kauffman, Chris Parker, and Bruce W. Weber, offers new ideas on the core issues and potential direction of fintech research across multiple academic disciplines, and in partnership with industry organizations. Their article is entitled “On the Fintech Revolution: Interpreting the Forces of Innovation, Disruption, and Transformation in Financial Services.”, presents a framework for assessing the innovation landscape that categorizes fintech initiatives into a Market-and-Competition vs. Customer Experience matrix. References 1.Farrell, J. Talk is cheap. American Economic Review, 85, 2 (1995), 186–190.

Magid Igbaria (1958-2002): Remembering a Scholar - Olfman, Lorne (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2002)
An obituary for Magid Igbaria, a professor and scholar of technology management and management information systems, is presented.

Special Issue: Impact of Information Systems on Market Structure and Function: Developing and Testing Theories - Clemons, Eric K; Kauffman, Robert J; Dewan, Rajiv M (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2008)
Eric K. Clemons is a Professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he has served since 1976. His visiting appointments include Harvard University, Cornell University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the Indian School of Business. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Management Information Systems and the International Journal of Electronic Commerce. His research specialties are in the areas of IT and business strategy and IT and financial markets. More specifically, he studies the impact of technology on consumer behavior, analyzing investments in strategic IT ventures, managing the risks of strategic outsourcing, managing the risk of strategic IT implementations, and strategic implications of e‑commerce for channel power and proﬁtability. He is the Director of the Wharton School’s Sponsored Research Program in Information, Strategy, and Economics; the Area Head for Information, Strategy, and Economics; and program coordinator for the school’s major in e‑commerce. He also is the founder of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences’ (HICSS) annual Competitive Strategy, Economics, and Information Systems mini-track, which had its twentieth anniversary meeting in January 2007, and the winner of two HICSS Best Paper awards. Robert J. Kauffman is the W.P. Carey Chair in Information Systems at the W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, where he serves with joint appointments in Finance, Supply Chain Management, and the College of Computer Science and Informatics. He has served on the faculty at New York University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Rochester, and worked in international banking and finance. He is also past director of the MIS Research Center. His research interests span the economics of IS, financial markets, technology adoption, competitive strategy and technology, IT value, strategic pricing and technology, supply-chain management, and theory development and empirical methods for IS research. He has won numerous research awards, including a 2007 Best Research award from the Journal of the Association of Information Systems for theory-building research in the area of product and market transparency made possible by IT. His recent paper on travel meta-search services providers won the Best Paper award at the 2008 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. His publications appear in Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Organization Science, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, and the Journal of the AIS, and elsewhere. Rajiv M. Dewan is an Associate Professor at the University of Rochester’s William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, where he is involved in research in electronic commerce, organizational issues in management and information systems, the information technology industry, and ﬁnancial information systems. He currently serves as the chair of the schoolwide doctoral program. His papers have been published in Management Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, Information Systems Research, INFORMS Journal of Computing, Decision Support Systems, IEEE Transactions on Computers, and other journals. Prior to joining the Simon School, he was a faculty member at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE Computer Society, INFORMS, Association for Information Systems, and Beta Gamma Sigma. Dr. Dewan and two other colleagues from the University of Rochester won the Best Paper award in the Internet and Digital Economy Track at HICSS‑35 in January 2002. He has been organizing HICSS mini-tracks on strategy, economics, IS, and e‑commerce since 1999. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Journal of Management Information Systems provides a great opportunity for the guest editors and the authors of this Special Issue to make a contribution to the Journal’s contents. In addition to some new tests of theories that have been presented here over the years, we also bring the readers’ attention to interesting new issues in research that will be valuable to develop further into their own research streams in the coming years. The topics we have selected are representative of the mainstream of competitive strategy and economic theory-motivated research, yet they reflect the motivation that we all have to innovate, look for new and interesting ways to inform managerial decision making in various contexts, and leverage new uses of technology that challenge some of the fundamentals of what we know as management scientists and business professionals. This issue’s contents are drawn from two sources: (1) As usual, our main source is the Competitive Strategy, Economics and Information Systems Mini-Track of the Forty-First Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) in 2008. (2) Our second source is papers that were submitted by authors who participated with us before at HICSS related to their topics, or whose papers we had a direct hand in developing under review and had seen presented elsewhere. Altogether we have eight papers, whose contents span a range of theories. They include the "move to the middle" theory, the theory of consumer behavior, consumer informedness theory, regret theory, the theory of newly vulnerable markets, and information economics for data quality optimization. The application areas studied are equally interesting, including government enforcement of antihacking laws, supply-chain management, peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, the retail goods and branding business, data management within the firm, the structure and performance of the online travel agency and air travel industry, prospective information technology (IT) investment evaluation, and two-sided network platforms. An important fact in this age of digital marketing and electronic marketing is that technology has changed the availability of information to consumers regarding the attributes, price, and other relevant details on what they can purchase. Eric K. Clemons, in the leadoff paper of this Special Issue, "How Information Changes Consumer Behavior and How Consumer Behavior Determines Corporate Strategy," argues that consumer informedness has never been higher. He notes that the changes in consumer informedness also have had a profound effect on the demand side of the market, changing patterns of consumption. He points to two key findings. First, when consumers know in detail what is available on the market, their utility for a product that does not quite match their needs is quite a bit lower in comparison to what it used to be, when it was much more difficult to find comparable goods. Second, when consumers are uncertain as to exactly what they want to buy, using the Internet channel makes it possible for them to find many more products that may approximate what they want, with the result that they tend to have higher utility than they would have had in the absence of the accessible choices. The author explores two kinds of market opportunities that are made possible with technology, using a historical perspective through which to leaven his theoretical perspective: the traditional mass market fat spots and the new resonance marketing sweet spots. By offering a spectrum of interesting examples and applications, and drawing new conclusions about situations that we thought we already knew quite well, Clemons leaves us with an impression of much deeper knowledge about consumer compromise and uncertainty discounts, branding and market segmentation, product differentiation and line extensions, and effective management practices to handle the increasing complexity of product portfolios. Consistent with our theme of testing theories and exploring new issues, the second paper of the Special Issue provides an empirical test of the "move to the middle" theory, initially presented in the Journal of Management Information Systems in 1993, by Clemons et al. [1]. Jason Dedrick, Sean Xin Xu, and Kevin Xiaoguo Zhu have written "How Does Information Technology Shape Supply-Chain Structure? Evidence on the Number of Suppliers." The authors report on a study of suppliers and electronic procurement for 150 U.S. manufacturing firms. They note that the custom-type of goods, and the supply-chain activities based on more integrated buyer-supplier interorganizational systems capabilities, are consistent with a greater likelihood of having more suppliers. This evidence is in favor of the "move to the middle" hypothesis. By the same token, when a manufacturer produces more commodity-like goods and the market is able to provide transparent policing of prices, there is less need for tight integration and so a smaller number of suppliers is observed. The third paper follows up the first with another new test of theory that has been developed by authors who have contributed to our HICSS mini-track on Competitive Strategy, Economics and Information Systems. Nelson F. Granados, Robert J. Kauffman, and Bradley King have authored a paper entitled "How Has Electronic Travel Distribution Been Transformed? A Test of the Theory of Newly Vulnerable Markets." The ideas have been brought into the information systems (IS) discipline by Eric Clemons and his coauthors since the 1990s, who refer to them and the extensions they have made as the theory of newly vulnerable markets. Surprisingly, though, these ideas have never been tested in the IS literature formally with analytic models or evaluated empirically. The current authors evaluate the primary tenets of the theory using the context of technological innovation and the changing power relationships of the air travel industry. Their work focuses on why key air travel industry players, especially the global distribution systems players (Amadeus, Galileo, Worldspan, and Sabre), have become vulnerable in the face of the new travel meta-search service providers’ technological innovations. The authors also provide evidence for two other tenets of the theory, including why the air travel reservations market has been attractive to attack—in spite of the long-standing dominance of the existing players—and why the incumbents have found it difficult to defend their positions. They emphasize that secondary technological intermediaries are creating the opportunity today for travelers to acquire uniquely informative bundles of related travel booking information that make it possible to increasingly select exactly the arrangements that match their exact needs. This paper was selected for the 2008 Best Paper Award in the Organizational Systems and Technology Track at HICSS 2008—one of just a handful at the conference. In "Information Risk of Inadvertent Disclosure: An Analysis of File-Sharing Risk in the Financial Supply Chain," M. Eric Johnson analyzes what happens when a group of large financial services firms experiences the inadvertent loss of sensitive documents via P2P file-sharing networks. This study examines vulnerabilities on the part of the firms, as well as the patterns for what happens when losses occur, across the suppliers, contractors, and customers of the top 30 banks in the United States. The author’s data on 16,000 P2P searches come from a seven-week period from late December 2005 to mid-February 2006, and involve P2P file-sharing on the three largest networks and some of the related P2P file-sharing clients: Gnutella via Limewire and BearShare, FastTrack via Kazaa and Grokster, and eDonkey via eMule and eDonkey2000. The author examined the role of brand visibility opertionalized by a measure of firm size as a basis for the bank’s capacity to "draw fire" from the P2P community in terms of file searches. The results that were obtained show the surprising extent to which sensitive documents end up being widely shared on the Internet, and reveal that larger firms seem to have particular problems in this respect. The author concludes that larger banks need to take more than proportionally more care to protect their documents and files from unwanted disclosures than their smaller counterparts. This research points to the burgeoning set of research opportunities that exist at the intersection between security and IS discipline issues such as information disclosure, customer data privacy, and the protection of sensitive information and intellectual property. The fifth paper of the Special Issue is by Ivan P.L. Png, Chen-Yu Wang, and Qiu-Hong Wang, entitled "The Deterrent and Displacement Effects of Information Security Enforcement: International Evidence." The authors study the efficacy of government enforcement of antihacking deterrence measures, and provide new evidence to suggest that vigorous enforcement in the United States has led to the movement of the various kinds of attacks to other parts of the globe, where lesser enforcement efforts make it possible to conduct the same kinds of fraudulent activities. The authors employ a sample of computer-based attacks via the Internet on 15 different countries between January 2004 and June 2006. To obtain their results, the authors integrated two different methodologies: an adaptation of event study methods coupled with linear regression. Overall, the authors did not find that unemployment levels in a country are associated with an increasing number of attacks, with the exception of the United States. The authors report limited evidence that more effort to enforce antihacking laws in a given country is associated with the deterrence of this form of criminal activity. They further note that delaying news about specific kinds of vulnerabilities that hackers might exploit is probably beneficial, because incidents of attack were found to have increased in the presence of such news. The final three papers in this Special Issue relate to the application of experimental economics in online markets, the design and ownership structure of two-sided networks involving Internet intermediaries, and the comparative performance of financial economics and real option valuation methods for IT investments compared to unaided senior management strategic intuition. We have been showcasing the development of new ideas in each of these areas—auction markets, ownership theory, and IT investment decision-making methods under uncertainty—in this journal for many years now. The sixth paper in this Special Issue is "Does Competition Promote Trust and Trustworthiness in OnlineTrading? An Experimental Study" by Gary Bolton, Claudia Loebbecke, and Axel Ockenfels. The authors conducted a set of online experiments involving tests of theory related to market efficiency and trust in the presence of networks of partners and networks of strangers, where sellers are likely to be affected by moral hazard. The key finding of this work suggests that the introduction of more competition in an online market is beneficial because the use of reputation as a means of discriminating among the trustworthiness of different participants becomes more reliable. More specifically, for networks of strangers, matching competition increases participant trust in the market mechanism and the perceived trustworthiness of counterparties to a transaction, but price competition leaves participant trust unchanged, while it diminishes the trustworthiness. In contrast, for networks of partners, both matching and price competition erase the advantage in trust and trustworthiness that partners networks have over strangers networks when there is no competition. The related conclusion by the authors is that the marketplace of strangers achieves higher aggregate social welfare from the overall gains in trade that are obtained. The penultimate paper in our Special Issue is by Yannis Bakos and Evangelos Katsamakas, entitled "Design and Ownership of Two-Sided Networks: Implications for Internet Platforms." The authors observe that prior research has not fully evaluated the inner workings of two-sided intermediated networks. Two-sided networks are an instance of what economists have referred to as two-sided markets. In two-sided markets, there is a platform that acts as common ground in support of the participation of buyers and sellers, interactive game players, traditional and Internet-based television and radio broadcasting, or voice-over Internet protocol (VoIP) callers and call receivers. Quite a few interesting problems remain though. Some of the issues frequently omitted from prior modeling efforts include how participants’ benefits are determined, how value is split among the participants and the network intermediary, and how the choices and actions of the intermediary influence the value that is created in the process. The emphasis of their research is to provide theory- and model-based recommendations for how two-sided networks should be designed, and how limited budgets for technology investment should be targeted. The issue of ownership structure is an increasingly important one, since most digital intermediaries find that it is necessary for their business partners to co-invest to some extent in order to appropriate the greatest amount of value from various kinds of interorganizational IT infrastructures. The final paper, "Uncertainty and Industry Structure Effects on Managerial Intuition About Information Technology Real Options," is by Nancy Lankton and Joan Luft, who compare real option-based valuation and the intuitive judgment of managerial decision makers involved in making IT investments. Their essential observation is that sometimes these match but other times they do not, and thus the authors’ goal is to explore the theoretical reasons why that may be the case. The authors explore regret theory and competitive behavior theories to distinguish between less and more aggressive valuations for deferral options and growth options involved in IT investments. They explain that uncertainty about IT investment returns on the part of the managerial decision maker is consistent with assigning higher value to deferral options and lower value to growth options, also reflecting the extent to which anticipated regret may play a role. In contrast, when there is a competitor that must be considered by the managerial decision maker, the dynamics change and the decision maker locks into a more aggressive valuation. The authors’ experimental study bears out the logic of the theoretical perspective that is offered, and points to the necessity of properly training managerial users of real option valuation methods so that they are less likely to make biased estimates. We wish to acknowledge Hugh Watson, Vladimir Zwass, Nelson Granados, Arti Mann, and the anonymous reviewers who helped us to develop these papers for publication. They deserve our thanks. Reference 1. Clemons, E.K.; Reddi, S.P.; and Row, M.C. The impact of information technology on the organization of economic activity: The "move to the middle" hypothesis. Journal of Management Information Systems, 10, 2 (Fall 1993), 9-36.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1997)
THE PAPERS IN THE SPECIAL SECTION ON STRATEGIC and competitive information systems that opens this issue analyze, respectively, the consequences of alternative information regimes in the insurance marketplace, of alternative allocations of decision rights and tasks in a firm, and of alternative trading mechanisms in securities markets--all of them strategic choices enabled by information technology. Each of the papers shows how some of the options borne by information systems are blind alleys of government regulation, organizational structuring, or market building--while others can lead to superior long-term performance. The Guest Editors of the Special Section, Eric K. Clemons and Bruce W. Weber, whose authorial and editorial efforts have produced or enhanced the papers in the section, describe it in their own introduction. The organizations of our information society are recognizably different from their predecessors in the industrial age with respect to structure, allocation of decision rights, and the nature of incentives--what some call the architecture of organizations. Yet, until now, information systems have been considered the bearers of options in this architecture, rather than carriers of directed change. For example, until now, the existing empirically based literature has not associated decentralization of authority with the use of information systems. The work by Lorin M. Hitt and Erik Brynjolfsson, reported here, may change this view. Using multi-industry firm-level data on large U.S. corporations, these authors show that high levels of investments in information systems are linked to decentralization, an increased role for knowledge work, and incentives that rely on workers' increased autonomy. Echoing the analyses presented in the Special Section, the paper argues that only some of the options are fruitful as information technology pervades the operation of organizations--and those are the options that abide. By setting out a theoretical framework and supporting it with exploratory empirics, Hitt and Brynjolfsson initiate a broad and important research program. Object-oriented systems development had undoubtedly emerged as the new paradigm, slowly supplanting the methodologies dubbed structured. However, this different way of thinking about the world being modeled by the information system is relatively difficult to master. Steven D. Sheetz, Gretchen Irwin, David P. Tegarden, H. James Nelson, and David E. Monarchi establish empirically the principal sources of the difficulty and suggest remedies. Their paper is of significant interest not only because of the presented results, but also because of the way they were obtained--the cognitive mapping technique deployed by the researchers using a group support system. The extent and nature of desirable end-user participation in systems development continue to be open issues. Here, James D. McKeen and Tor Guimaraes empirically identify five core participative behaviors that are significantly related to user satisfaction with the resulting information system; they also identify a long list of participative behaviors desirable in the development of more complex systems. These results should have a bearing on our understanding of the appropriate role of offshore development. Destination information systems are identified as a distinct type of interorganizational information system by Hong-Mei Chen and Pauline J. Sheldon, who describe a coherent set of design requirements and the architecture of these systems. Designed to service broadly understood travel needs, these systems may be expected to be available in the future over the World Wide Web, which should sharply change the nature of intermediation in travel commerce. Jerry L. Maier, R. Kelly Rainer, and Charles A. Snyder investigate the preferred ways organizations with different innovation-oriented postures scan for information about information technology. The authors find surprising uniformity in these scanning behaviors. The performance of artificial neural networks in decision problems where the events need to be dichotomized into two categories with unequal probabilities of occurrence is the subject of Bharat A. Jain and Barin N. Nag. Ex-ante identification of the future success or failure of a business venture going public is one such problem of (considerable) interest. It would be an overstatement to say that all will be revealed to readers of this issue's final paper, but the authors do show that neural networks can compete effectively with the statistical techniques being used for such purposes today. VLADIMIR ZWASS Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1989)

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2000)
INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCHERS HAVE DEVOTED MOST OF THEIR EFFORTS to the hierarchy end of the hierarchy-markets spectrum of business governance. Having contributed significantly to our understanding of organizational management information systems, this work has more recently resulted also in a firmer conceptualization of the interorganizational systems that combine firms in supply and cooperation networks. This direction is and will remain vital to our field. Yet, the time has come to devote greater attention to the relationships between information systems and markets. There are many sides to these relationships. Information systems are deployed to create marketplaces with the desired participation and characteristics; Web auctions are probably the best example for today. Marketplaces for information goods are another area now being subjected to investigation. These markets have distinct properties, flowing, inter alia, from the near-zero marginal cost of the product and of its distribution. They are also subject to more or less subtle manipulation, both by illegal and legal means. In order to ensure efficient resource allocation in these markets, it is important to structure them with incentive compatibility in mind. Several papers that open the present issue of the journal do indeed address nodal issues at the intersection of information systems and marketplaces. The variety of methodologies that aim at the target is highly notable. In the first article, Alok Gupta, Boris Jukic, Dale O. Stahl, and Andrew B. Whinston develop an incentive-compatible mechanism for pricing Internet services. Although until now the Internet operation has been relying on fixed-fee pricing for a relatively uniform service quality, it is widely expected that pay-for-service-quality regimes will be established in the very near future. It then becomes important to establish price levels that would allocate the scarce resource of higher-priority treatment to the users who value it highest. It is also necessary to design a value-revelation mechanism that would not provide an incentive for the users to "game" the system. Most of the Internet pricing mechanisms currently put forward assume that the users state the urgency of their demand, which is, of course, not incentive-compatible. It is the highly original contribution of the present paper to offer a method for estimating the cost of delay to a user from the actual on-line behavior of the user. This work can be expected to generate both scholarly and practical interest. It can also be applied in environments other than the Internet. Using the approach of experimental economics, Y. Alex Tung and James R. Marsden study the impact of inside information on trading volumes in securities markets. Beyond that, the authors are able to design experiments that analyze the outcomes of potential regulatory changes. Since information systems are a principal means of market surveillance, this contribution presents, in effect, a workstation for developing regulatory and punitive mechanisms in security marketplaces. Lawrence A. West Jr. investigates pricing policies that have been used by on-line database vendors. As purveyors of what economists call public goods, they need to develop efficient markets for the product that can be widely copied and circulated, for example, over the Internet. West finds that by adopting a combination of pricing strategies, the industry has been able to create a well-functioning market for computer-readable information. With service enhancements, incentives have been created to protect products from unauthorized reuse. Moreover, market participants have been continuously adapting their behavior to drastic technological change, with mutual benefit: The invisible hand has been guided properly. Another aspect of creating a market for information goods is studied by Srinivasan Raghunathan. The author investigates the profitability of introducing simultaneous multiple software editions, as well as upgrades, to serve the needs of multiple market segments. The near-zero marginal production cost results in specificities here as compared to the well-established segmentation strategies in the markets for physical goods. Some of the results are quite surprising. The author is able to make definite recommendations to the managers responsible for marketing software packages. The work is capable of extension in several directions, including the provision of application services on a rental basis. A related, if largely nefarious, software marketing practice is investigated with the use of an entirely different methodology by John A. Hoxmeier. Product preannouncements long before the ship date, or in lieu of shipments that never take place, have been an industry practice for decades. Are they a breach of trust, or is a long lead time to delivery a helpful means of signaling to the potential customer and other vendors meant to enable them to prepare for the release? It appears that the specificity of software as a product asserts itself again. In the perceptions of the managers surveyed, it is only the final functionality that counts-another guideline to the marketers. The distribution of multimedia objects, such as high-resolution images, video, audio, and various combinations thereof, over computer networks is what we see ever more of. Sandeep Purao and Tae-Dong Han present here a formal model and a more pragmatic approach to the distribution of multimedia content over intranets. The approach taken by the authors makes it possible to offer a spectrum of service quality at a corresponding cost for the initial distribution of multimedia content. A prototype design is offered as a proof of concept. It has been widely argued that a flexible information technology infrastructure, from which new business initiatives can be launched, is strategically important to organizations. However, no method to measure the flexibility construct has been available-until now. Here, Terry Anthony Byrd and Douglas E. Turner operationalize the construct and present a validated instrument for its measurement. This work is of obvious importance to the practitioners, who will be able to root their infrastructure claims in measurable dimensions. No doubt, it will also stimulate the interest of researchers in refining the factors presented by the authors. Business-to-business (B2B) commerce dominates the present electronic commerce. This is well known. It is not equally well known that Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), and private-network EDI in particular, dominates B2B e-commerce. The ubiquity of EDI in business practices leads Gregory E. Truman to conclude that its organizational disposition has moved from the strategic to the tactical level. Accordingly, he studies how the integration of EDI with other corporate systems affects corporate performance. In addition, Truman finds the influence of integration among the internal systems themselves to be salient to the way EDI deployment influences financial outcomes. Management information systems in the public sector are a weighty component of the overall MIS engagement. It is also a vastly understudied one. Here, James Y.L. Thong, Chee-Sing Yap, and Kin-Lee Seah present a case study of business process reengineering (BPR) in a large public organization in Singapore. Relative absence of market pressures, combined with more elaborate internal processes, distinguishes public organizations from private firms and affects organizational change. Although some of the findings apply to both private and public companies, the authors are able to offer detailed guidelines for conducting public-sphere BPR, which cannot be easy, even in Singapore. Of particular interest is the role of an information system pilot in promoting the goals of the reengineering effort. This issue opens our seventeenth year of publication. It has become customary to thank at such time our readers, members of our Editorial Board and, crucially, the JMIS referees, who all collaborate in the success of the Journal. Here are our reviewers, the primary guarantors of the quality of our papers: William Acar Dennis A. Adams Niv Ahituv Murugan Anandarajan Lynda M. Applegate Paul Attewell Sulin Ba Barbro Back Yannis Bakos P.R. Balasubramanian Dirk Baldwin Dinesh Batra Salvatore Belardo Michael Benaroch Francois Bergeron Sudip Bhattacherjee Bijoy Bordoloi Carol V. Brown Jeffrey Butterfield Terry A. Byrd Edward G. Cale, Jr. Judith Carlisle Sven Carlsson Erran Carmel Houston H. Carr William J. Carroll Robert P. Cerveny Namsik Chang Patrick Chau Hong-Mei Chen Hsing Kenneth Cheng Robert T.H. Chi Roger Chiang William C. Chismar Jong-min Choe H. Michael Chung Roger Clarke Sue Conger Randy Cooper Timothy P. Cronan David C. Croson Paul Cule Ronald Dattero Michael J. Davern Donald L. Davis Sarv Devaraj Ali Dogramaci Peter Duchessi Omar A. El Sawy Hyun B. Eom Gerald E. Evans Steven Feiner Kirk Fiedler Edmond P. Fitzgerald Jerry Fjermestad Steven W. Floyd Edward Fox Dennis Galletta Edward J. Garrity Bezalel Gavish Erol Gelenbe Mark Ginsburg Janis L. Gogan Dale Goodhue Sanjay Gosain Martin D. Goslar Paul Gray Saul Greenberg Robert K. Griffin Michael D. Grigoriades Mary-Liz Grise Tor Guimaraes Alok Gupta Barbara Haley Bill C. Hardgrave Il-Horn Hann Paul Hart Stephen Hayne Roxanne Starr Hiltz Rudy Hirschheim Lorin M. Hitt Richard Hoffman John A. Hoxmeier Qing Hu Cary T. Hughes Ard Huizing E. Gerald Hurst Gretchen I. Irwin Tomas Isakowitz Bharat A. Jain Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa Murray E. Jennex Per V. Jenster Linda Ellis Johnson Kailash Joshi Charles Kacmar Surinder Kahai Timo Kakola Ajit Kambil P.K. Kannan Jahangir Karimi Michael Kattan Mark Keil Robert T. Keim Chris Kemerer Julie E. Kendall William J. Kettinger Omar E.M. Khalil Melody Y. Kiang Gary Klein Stefan Koch Esther Koster Kenneth A. Kozar Kenneth L. Kraemer Ramayya Krishnan Uday Kulkarni Ram Kumar Mary C. Lacity Simon S.K. Lam Gwynne Larsen Tor J. Larsen Kathy S. Lassila Heeseok Lee Ho Geun Lee Jungwoo Lee Dorothy Leidner Richard Leifer Mary Jane Lenard Hugo Levecq Ting-Peng Liang Nancy Lightner Yihwa Irene Liou Astrid Lipp Paulo J.G. Lisboa Henry C. Lucas, Jr. Kalle Lyytinen William McCarthy Jane M. Mackay Roy McKelvey Ephraim R. McLean Poppy L. McLeod Gregory Madey Simha R. Magal Mo A. Mahmood David Maier Ji-Ye Mao Salvatore T. March Anne P. Massey Charles H. Mawhinney Jerrold H. May Karon Meehan Roberto J. Mejias Shaila Miranda Rajesh Mirani William H. Money Ali R. Montazemi Ramiro Montealegre Janette Moody Ajay S. Mookerjee Scott Moore Jolene Morrison Michael D. Myers Kathleen Mykytyn Peter P. Mykytyn, Jr. Barin N. Nag Murli Nagasundaram R. Ryan Nelson Boon Siong Neo Fred Niederman Rosalie Ocker Lorne Olfman James Oliver Levent Orman Richard Orwig Jonathan W. Palmer Raymond R. Panko Lee Papayanopoulos Michael Parent Diane Parente Kenneth Peffers Norman Pendegraft Mark Pendergast Roger A. Pick Leo L. Pipino Robert Plant Steven Poltrock Gerald Post John H. Prager Jayesh Prasad G. Premkumar Sandeep Purao S. Raghunathan Arik Ragowsky T.S. Ragu-Nathan Arun Rai Rex Kelly Rainer, Jr. K.S. Raman B. Ramesh Richard G. Ramirez H.R. Rao R. Ravichandran T. Ravichandran Sury Ravindran Amy W. Ray Louis Raymond Paul Resnick William B. Richmond Frederick Riggins Daniel Robey Michael C. Row Young U. Ryu Sherry D. Ryan Timo Saarinen Rajiv Sabherwal Sharon Salveter G. Lawrence Sanders Tuomas Sandholm Radhika Santhanam John Satzinger Carol Saunders Naveed Saleem George Schell K.D. Schenk Irmtraud S. Seeborg Kishore Sengupta Vikram Sethi Kenneth C. Sevcik Dennis G. Severance Theresa M. Shaft Steven Sheetz Jim Sheffield Olivia Sheng Michael Shields J.P. Shim Siew Kien Sia Mark S. Silver Atish P. Sinha Sumit Sircar Charles A. Snyder William E. Spangler Rajendra P. Srivastava Eric W. Stein John M. Stevens Veda Storey Girish Subramanian Ramesh Subramanian Ephraim Sudit Robert T. Sumichrast Shankar Sunarajan Arun Sundararajan Tae Kyung Sung Edward J. Szewczak Paul P. Tallon Kar Yan Tam Bernard C.Y. Tan Mohan R. Tanniru Alfred Taudes David P. Tegarden James T.C. Teng Hock-Hai Teo Thompson Teo Matthew Thatcher Ron Thompson James Y.L. Thong John Tillquist Leon van der Torre Jonathan K. Trower Duane Truex Gregory E. Truman Ilkka Tuomi Jon A. Turner Brad Tuttle Craig K. Tyran N.S. Umanath Yaniv Vakrat Alfredo Vellido Boris S. Verkhovsky Ajay Vinze Steven Walczak Michael S. Wang Shouhong Wang Y. Richard Wang Carol Watson Richard Watson Mary Beth Watson-Manheim Bruce Weber Chih-Ping Wei Peter Weill Charles E. Wells Larry West J. Christopher Westland Seungjin Whang Michael E. Whitman George Widmeyer Fons Wijnhoven Kristoff K. Wolyniec Hans Wortmann Chee Sing Yap Evangelos Yfantis Ilze Zigurs Moshe Zviran

The Impact of Open Source Software on the Strategic Choices of Firms Developing Proprietary Software - Jaisingh, Jeevan; See-To, Eric W K; Tam, Kar Yan (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2008)
Open source software (OSS) is now posing significant competition to proprietary or closed source software (CSS) in several software markets. In this paper, we characterize the response of a firm developing CSS (where the CSS is a revenue earner) to the presence of an OSS in its market. In particular, we look at the firm's choice of resource investments to improve quality and the firm's pricing decisions. We are primarily motivated by the following questions: Would a firm producing CSS produce higher-quality software when it faces competition from an OSS than when there is no OSS in its market? Would there be a change in the firm's response if the CSS faced competition from another CSS in addition to competition from the OSS? We show that the firm produces lower-quality CSS when it faces competition from an OSS than when it does not. Also, the quality of the CSS decreases as the quality of the OSS increases. This result holds true even if we consider network effects. When we consider competition from another CSS, in addition to competition from the OSS, then the quality of the CSS could increase or decrease as the quality of the OSS increases. The change in quality depends on how closely substitutable the two CSS are. We also extend our base model to consider (1) competition for resources, (2) uncertainty in resources available to the OSS, and (3) uncertainty about the software development process.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1987)

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2015)
The Special Section on Online Social Connections that opens the issue throws light on two of the effects of the massive social connections enabled online. Crowdsourcing makes organizations more effective and efficient by bringing widely dispersed and diverse knowledge inside the firm. We learn from the first paper in the section how to increase the performance of the virtual teams based on the crowdsourcing platforms. On the other hand, online activities, and those of teenagers in particular, create growing privacy exposures, with the data subject to mining and, possibly, misuse. The second paper in the Special Section makes an empirical assessment of the family preferences with respect to the mining of the data traces left by their teen offspring and suggests the potential regulatory regimes with respect to this relatively vulnerable population. Information technology (IT), as we know well, is not good and not bad. As it has wisely been said, IT is also not neutral because it changes the realm of the possible and enables new forces that deeply affect the way we live. It is good to see that the authors of the Special Section do not leave it all to market forces, which may favor privacy-depriving rents even in the face of competition. The guest editors, Eric K. Clemons, Rajiv M. Dewan, Robert J. Kauffman, and Thomas A. Weber, introduce the papers in greater detail. We know full well that the returns from the deployment of IT vary greatly across industries. As yet, the full and satisfactory explanation for this eludes us. In the first paper of the general section, Fei Ren and Sanjeev Dewan provide an extensive empirical analysis showing how the IT investment by an industry is inflected by its characteristics to lead to disparate outcomes in productivity, profitability, and investment risk. The characteristics moderating the effects of an industry’s IT investment are competition and regulation (with roughly opposite effects), and the degree of technological change. The model is comprehensive and the results are robust. Take-up and success in the implementation of service-oriented architecture (SOA) has proved to be a challenge, in spite of the apparent advantages of that technology. A new approach to the analysis of the factors of this success (or its absence) is needed. Here, Xitong Li and Stuart E. Madnick use such an approach, expressing the actual process of SOA implementation via systems dynamics. The authors find the presence of the tipping point that can reverse a failure course in the implementation, and lead to ultimate success. The intricate interaction of the human agency and the technology-implementation process can lead into organizational traps—or can be steered to avoid them. This work can certainly be broadened in the future to enhance our knowledge and practice of IT implementation in general. The theme of software-process improvement is continued in the paper by Muammer Ozer and Doug Vogel. Taking the knowledge-sharing perspective on the activity of software developers, the researchers are able to relate empirically the effects of this sharing on the developers’ performance. Their model is much enriched by its contextual moderators and highlights the importance of the organizational climate in software development. Arising from task closure theory, the work contributes to it by surfacing the moderators in highly knowledge-intensive tasks, as well as contributing to the practice of software development. Three papers in the issue present theory-driven investigations of social networks. The first, by Lara Khansa, Xiao Ma, Divakaran Liginlal, and Sung S. Kim focuses on online question-and-answer (Q&A) communities. As opposed to work- and task-oriented ones, these are highly flexible communities, where both active participation (asking and answering) and passive participation (lurking) are of value, but, clearly, active participation is the sine qua non of a community’s existence. The motivators of the active participants need, therefore, to be very carefully assessed and enacted. The authors take a goal perspective, whereby the setting, pursuit, and automatic activation of the community members’ goals drives their activity. The authors test their model using data from a leading Q&A platform and arrive at theory-driven guidance for such enterprises. We well know that the positive brand-related articulations in social networks can lead to increased sales. We know quite a lot, but need to know much more about the effects of various activities. There are two different fonts of contributions in social media: (1) autonomous activity undertaken by individuals/consumers, such as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) in user communities; and (2) sponsored activity, supported or generated by the brand owner or the brand agents (e.g., advertisers). Here, Karen Xie and Young-Jin Lee investigate the differential effects of the two, termed, respectively, earned and owned social media, on both online and offline brand sales. The authors find that both have positive effects on sales, but they also find—and this is the point—that the two types of activities have a mutually suppressive effect. Considering that the sponsored activity is under the sponsor’s control, this is an important message to the brands, as are the results concerning the limitations of social media with respect to offline sales. Jongtae Yu, Paul Jen-Hwa Hu, and Tsang-Hsiang Cheng study empirically how affect influences self-disclosure on social networks. Self-disclosure is, of course, crucially important to the platforms and to many of their participants. As opposed to prior literature reports, the authors find a highly nuanced relationship between the individual’s affect and the disclosure of personal information. The important takeaway from their work is that affect influences self-disclosure indirectly, through the change in cost–benefit perceived by the individual. The work has implications that go beyond the compass of the present paper and is likely to resonate in other settings. IT plays the essential role in the functioning of financial markets. It must—and will—also play such a role in the surveillance of these markets. The two roles of IT are yet to be matched in scope and speed. It is vitally important to the health and transparency of financial markets, often maligned and always indispensable, that the systems for transacting and surveilling be designed from the ground up in an equally transparent fashion. The next paper in the issue contributes to this end by presenting a design theory for market surveillance systems (MSSs). The authors, Xin Li, Sherry X. Sun, Kun Chen, Terrance Fung, and Huaiqing Wang, present and validate with a prototype a theory-driven design for MSSs. They incorporate market-information analysis in their design, to go beyond current MSS limitations. The paper is of twofold significance: It is obviously a foundation for the design of MSSs and it is also a contribution to design science within the IT domain. The risk and occurrences of data breaches are part of the way we live now. In the concluding paper of the issue, Ravi Sen and Sharad Borle use several theoretical lenses and multiple data sources to study the effects on the likelihood of data breach of factors such as the firm’s location (state laws), industry sector, path dependence, and investment in IT security (and here the result is unexpected, yet explained). The risk factors brought to light by the authors may be used by firms in assessing the necessary levels of their security expenditures. Taken together with the preceding work, the two papers make another contribution by our discipline to the seeking of confidence that all us need to have in our information systems. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Special Section: Strategic Information Systems - Clemons, Eric K; Weber, Bruce W (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1998)
FOR THE NINTH YEAR, THE SPECIAL SECTION ON STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS appears in the Journal of Management Information Systems to present innovative research on the impact of information systems on organizational strategy and performance, and on the structure of new electronic markets. Earlier versions of all three papers included here were presented and published in the Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science--31 in January 1998. These papers were selected from the tightly coupled HICSS minitracks on Strategic and Competitive Information Systems and Market Technostructure. The papers in the special section this year emphasize how information technology can transform firms' capabilities and market structures, but how organizational factors often preclude the best potential utilization of the IT innovations. In particular, IT facilitates richer and more effective interaction in financial markets and can lead to more liquid and cost-effective trading for market participants. Two of the papers examine IT innovations in financial markets; the other focuses on the organizational challenges in exploiting IT innovations. The first paper, "The Formal and Systematic Specification of Market Structures and Trading Services," by Martin Reck of the University of St. Gallen, proposes a specification language for designing market trading systems and detailing their functionality. The method makes explicit and formal the operations of the market and the trading rules imposed. Use of the author's proposed language in trading system development will integrate strategic considerations in market structure definition with technical factors in trading system specification and program design. A result should be better market designs and more flexible information systems to support trading. In the second paper, "Culturally Induced Information Impactedness: A Prescription for Failure in Software Ventures," Lesley R. Matheson, Research Scientist at Inter-Trust Technologies, and Robert E. Tarjan, of Princeton University, describe a sequence of events in which organizational responses undermined the successful development and implementation of new software. The third paper in the minitrack is "Restructuring Insti~tutional Block Trading: An Overview of the OptiMark System" by Eric K. Clemons and Bruce W. Weber. The paper is a case study examining a next-generation trading system, OptiMark, in which traders submit not ordinary buy and sell orders, but profiles that resemble supply and demand curves. The system will become operational in Fall 1998 as part of the Pacific Exchange (PCX), and will create an entirely new way of trading large blocks of stocks, which could have profound implications for stock exchanges and Wall Street firms. These three papers offer a cross section of the important, current research being conducted on strategic information systems and their impacts on markets and organizations. The future is also bright for this area of research. As business innovators continue to harness expanding computer and network capabilities, there will be further advances in the strategic applications of IT. These advances will provide a growing set of opportunities to examine the implications and impacts of strategic information systems, and to guide the next generation of IT innovations.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2021)
The two papers that open the 38th volume of Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS) help us greatly to understand how information systems (IS) should be managed. The first of them, by Narayan Ramasubbu and Chris F. Kemerer, investigates the remediation of technical debt incurred with outsourced enterprise systems. Indeed, systems maintenance has not disappeared into the cloud. The notoriously long-lived enterprise systems attract very high costs over the decades of their operation. Moreover, owing to the technological and environmental developments these costs are difficult to forecast. As this maintenance is burdensome for the owner firms in many respects beyond the financial one, it is generally outsourced to specialized vendors. The long life of the legacy software and of the outsourcing contracts is a natural breeding ground for costly problems. Dealing with these issues calls for control balancing, that is, an ongoing client-vendor engagement process aimed at reducing the information asymmetry between the two parties. In this work, the researchers ask, by deploying both modeling and empirical investigations with a large number of projects, how effective is control balancing in remediating technical debt. They offer a multifaceted answer grounded in several contingencies and leading to actionable advice. By integrating several research streams from both IS management and systems development, Ramasubbu and Kemerer also show how the multifaceted knowledge inherent in our field can be brought to bear on nodal issues. IS investments are among the most weighty the contemporary firms make, both in terms of the costs and the outcomes such as the firm’s performance. These dependencies have been studied extensively. The authors of the next paper, John Qi Dong, Prasanna P. Karhade, Arun Rai, and Sean Xin Xu, back up from these studies and investigate how the investment decisions are actually made. They offer a novel behavioral agency theory of the IS investment decisions, by integrating the behavioral theory of the firm with agency theory, and with the econometric analysis of a large panel dataset that tests and corroborates the proposed theory. Local innovation in response to the identified corporate performance gaps and the corporate governance are found to be important factors in the decision making that determines the scale of IS investment by a firm. The theory proposed here brings us closer to a realistic understanding of the IS investment processes and their outcomes. Two subsequent papers address the incentive mechanisms operative in the consumer-centric online environments. Jaehwuen Jung, Ravi Bapna, Alok Gupta, and Soumya Sen empirically study the effectiveness of different types of incentives in online referral programs, whose objective is to maximize the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) by offering rewards for bringing in a new customer. The mechanisms compared here include the selfish one (the inviter gets the reward), the equal one (the inviter and the invitee share equally), and the generous one (the invitee gets it). The theoretical premises of the research are in the sociological and economic studies of incentives and contagion. The empirical validation is a natural experiment conducted in the gigantic lab of the Internet with the participation of companies developing gaming apps. The two pro-social mechanisms where the invitee participates in the reward are found decisively more effective. The importance of the findings is certainly beyond the present setting, and the work is generative. We do know that extrinsic rewards (say, money) can have negative effects on the motivation of altruistically inclined actors. And yet, we see the public TV networks offering DVDs to the putative contributors. There are numerous online sites that rely on voluntary contributions and need to decide whether and at what level to provide monetary incentives to induce or increase such contributions. Dandan Qiao, Shun-Yang Lee, Andrew B. Whinston, and Qiang Wei conduct randomized experiments to determine how these enticements can actually have a positive effect on the amounts raised. Based on several behavioral theories, the authors test two intervention techniques in combination with various levels of monetary incentives. They are able to offer actionable advice — and to contribute to our understanding of motivations in voluntary behaviors. We are witnessing profound societal changes brought by the deployment of information technologies. The next two papers of the issue investigate two vital aspects of this change. As we know full well, innovation drives a flourishing society. We are also aware that innovation is to a large extent culturally conditioned. How does a nation’s information technology (IT) impact the influence of culture on the nation’s innovation? This is the research question addressed by Terence J.V. Saldanha, Babu John Mariadoss, Michelle Xiao Wu, and Sunil Mithas. The authors use the well-known, if often debated, cultural dimensions and three best global databases to reflect national cultures. They also deploy several databases reflecting national competitiveness and technological development. Based on these data sources and their analysis, the authors give us a granular and interesting picture of how the IT deployment moderates the influence of the specific cultural dimensions on national innovation. The work is highly generative, opening multiple avenues for future research, and of potential to influence national IT policies. The infusion of IT into our life and work is profoundly changing the use of human labor, the nature and rewards of work and jobs, and the placement of working and private lives. One of the more prominent factors is the emergence of the sharing economy, where the sharing of resources, be they lodgings, workplaces, or cars, is enabled by IT platforms. What influence do these platforms have on the structure of labor markets? Ziru Li, Yili Hong, and Zhongju Zhang empirically study the influence of the preeminent Uber platform on the supply (participating drivers) and the demand (workers who could participate) sides on the ride-sharing labor market. The authors termed these, respectively, the empowering and competing effects of the sharing platform and found, in particular, a significant and salutary worker-empowerment effect. The finding (not without qualifications) is important, in the light of the well-known controversies concerning the “sharing” business models. IS have a great, and continually explored in our field, potential to serve public good. The scourge of drug addiction is a public ill we can help ameliorate. In the next paper, Jiaheng Xie, Zhu Zhang, Xiao Liu, and Daniel Zeng attack opioid use disorder with a novel deep-learning system that deploys the articulations on social media platforms to discover the barriers to treatment from the (potential or actual) patients’ perspectives. With the use of the system, the authors identify thirteen obstacles to the treatment of opioids and their morphs, which are subsequently confirmed by the domain experts. The approach significantly outperforms the extant natural language processing methods and can be generalized as well as particularized to other targets. As most IT, social media are used for the good and for the opposite of it. Fighting fake news, launched, propagated, and amplified on social networks, is the uphill battle we are, and will be, fighting. “Fake news” is easy to deploy, erodes our notions of truth and fact, debases our societal bonds, and erodes the quality of our social and political life. It is a present danger. Many and various weapons are needed to fight it. Here, Henner Gimpel, Sebastian Heger, Christian Olenberger, and Lena Utz investigate empirically the use of social norms in the design of the network’s user interface. The authors’ emipircs use the combination of injunctive and descriptive messages reflecting the social norms to encourage reporting fake news. The theory-based approach is found effective in practice and, we hope, will be further studied and deployed. Owing to the power of the Internet, a security breach in any company can affect not only the owner firm but can escalate to become an issue of national security. Paradoxically or plainly, more digitized firms face greater exposures. IT outsourcing is a source of exposures. In fact, any acquired software can lead to breaches, as even heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) subcontractors have been known to install malware-ridden programs on their clients’ systems. Greater IT investments are not a panacea, as the study by He Li, Sungjin Yoo, and William J. Kettinger shows. Their longitudinal empirical investigation studies the impacts of the firms’ IT security investments on the breaches, depending on the degree of the firm’s digitalization and on its embeddedness in outsourcing arrangements. The findings are granular, as the authors discriminate among the types of attacks and the attackers’ posture to arrive at their results and recommendations. The concluding paper of the issue brings into our orbit the value creation by IS in the services offered by autonomous vehicles. More specifically, big data analytics are deployed to analyze the tradeoff between personalization and energy efficiency in this subdomain of service robotics. With their access to a unique dataset, Schahin Tofangchi, André Hanelt, David Marz, and Lutz M. Kolbe operationalize the trade-off and use machine learning to devise and evaluate a paradigmatic IS to actuate the trade-off preferences in real time. The work is highly generative, as the trade-off approach can be generalized and applied to other service-robotics settings and beyond. Our discipline will certainly have more to offer in this regard in the future.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2019)
“The Internet changes everything” was the mantra of the early 1990s, when the Web and the browser opened the global network to a myriad users — a quarter century ago already. Well, the Internet has not changed the law of supply and demand as a leading business-focused daily claimed at the time, yet has indeed impacted profoundly the way our lives are lived, the way we produce, consume, gain and share information and knowledge, entertain ourselves, and relate to others and influence them. Passive consumers of products and information have become active co-creators, in multifaceted social relationships with others. The Internet has made other information technologies (IT) impactful, with diverse first- and higher-order effects. Much of the research agenda of our field consists in studying these impacts in order to better understand and, as much as possible, affect them in a positive direction. The study of the last aspect, that of relationships and influence, is the subject of the papers included in the Special Section on Social Influence and Networked Business Interaction, guest-edited by Robert J. Kauffman and Thomas A. Weber. The papers present the investigations of the influence of the ride-hailing services on the markets for new cars; of the impact of the physicians’ adherence to clinical guidelines on their online reputation (and thus on the helpfulness of the reviews the physicians garner online); and of the influence of the cascades of similar content items on social media platforms on the diffusion of a given content. The Guest Editors introduce the papers and the innovative methodologies they deploy. A multiplicity of IT impacts, as enabled and leveraged by the Internet-Web, ought to be considered negative. Three papers in the regular part of the issue throw an inquiring light on the dark side of IT use. Cyberharassment, technostress, and obsessive online gambling are the cyber-ills investigated by the authors with the aim of offering effective remedies. In the first paper, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Jun Zhang, Gregory D. Moody, Sutirtha Chatterjee, Chuang Wang, and Tailai Wu offer a comprehensive theory of cyberharassment by integrating two well established sociological theories and viewing them with a technological lens. The authors have dichotomized the online harassers into two categories, more and less experienced offenders, and have shown the ways in which addressing the behavior of the two has to differ. The sociotechnical approach of the authors foregrounds the role of technology in enabling cyberharassment, which should lead to design-theory studies of its technological prevention. Henri Pirkkaleinen, Markus Salo, Monideepa Tarafdar, and Markus Makkonen deploy the literature on coping with stressful situations to consider two types of preventive behavior and adapt this knowledge to coping with technostress. Proactive coping involves preparation and marshaling of resources, while reactive coping encompasses the cognitive measures and behaviors emerging in response to stressors. The two are interrelated, with the proactive coping affecting the reactive response to technostress. The model developed and empirically validated by the authors includes the examination of the coping measures’ effect on IT-related productivity. Habitual online gambling may (but does not have to) become a pattern that needs to be controlled. Jinghui (Jove) Hou, Keehyung Kim, Sung S. Kim, and Xiao Ma validate a conceptual framework that shows how IT may be deployed to disrupt negative gambling habits. The authors differentiate between the increasingly popular online sports games and the casino games, and address them differentially. The disruption of the regularity of gambling emerges as a weighty means of intervention. This third paper aiming at controlling the undesirable effects of IT shows again that the IT has to be a large part of the solution to the IT-induced problems, and we can turn to the design-science methods of our discipline to develop these technological means. Multi-sourcing of interrelated IT and business services is a frequent mode of procurement, out of necessity or in the pursuit of the most favorable economic and technological outcomes. Owing to the interdependence of the sourced components, the architectural arrangement is generally difficult to establish and to manage. Recourse by the client firm to a guardian vendor in managing the multi-sourcing may be desirable. Should the guardian firm assume full responsibility for the governance or should it be co-responsible along with the client firm? Ilan Oshri, Jens Dibbern, Julia Kotlarsky, and Oliver Krancher answer this question in the context of a broader inquiry into the role of guardianship in multi-sourcing. Based on the data from multiple organizations and adopting the information-processing view, the authors proffer actionable advice, as well as contributing to the outsourcing theory. Creativity support systems have been used, inter alia, to stimulate idea generation. This may be done by exposing the individuals during the ideation to design examples, pictures, concepts, or analogies. Should the stimuli be related to the creative task at hand or should they be at some cognitive distance from it? Ideation authorities differ. In the next paper, Kai Wang and Jeffrey V. Nickerson answer this question with an interesting empirical approach. The researchers design a program to go down the Wikipedia links from the focal concept to the ever less related ones and are thus able to establish a spectrum of relatedness of the potential stimulants. The ingenious method allows the authors to draw the conclusions as to the novelty, quantity, and usefulness of ideas generated with exposure to the stimuli of differing relatedness to the focal task. The method itself will find a broader use. Online reviews are the domain of the ever more sophisticate studies, of which two are presented here. Naveen Kumar, Deepak Venugopal, Liangfei Qiu, and Subodha Kumar have devised and tested a method of detecting anomalous (read, probably fake) reviews. They use unsupervised learning in a combination with a more extensive classification of reviewer behavior than the categorizations available heretofore. The method is shown to yield superior performance. The authors also argue against the use of supervised learning for the detection task, subject as it is to the rapid aging of the training data, and to the labeling costs and errors. In the concluding paper, Michael Siering and Christian Janze study the response seen on the review platforms in consequence to a major event. The reviews studied are on a restaurant platform and the events are critical restaurant health inspection reports. The perspective taken by the authors is that of the efficient market hypothesis as modified by the adaptive market hypothesis, with the response of the market player to the report either by quality improvement (reflected by the starred online evaluation) or by a flurry of potentially fake positive reviews. The authors’ findings show the presence of both reactions and are refined by the consideration of the environment where the restaurants find themselves. Collectively, the two papers enhance our understanding of the detection of deception in online reviews and will help to enhance the trustworthiness of the electronic word-of-mouth.

Special Section: The Transformative Value of Cloud Computing: A Decoupling, Platformization, and Recombination Theoretical Framework - Benlian, Alexander; Kettinger, William J; Sunyaev, Ali; Winkler, Till J (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2018)
ALEXANDER BENLIAN (benlian@ise.tu-darmstadt.de; corresponding author) is a Professor of Management Information Systems (MIS) at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, where he serves as Dean of the Department of Business, Economics, and Law. His former academic position was Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, where he received a Ph.D. He has also served as a senior consultant with McKinsey & Company. Dr. Benlian’s research interests include the transformative value of cloud computing, online platforms, digital transformation, and digital business models, with over 150 academic publications in these areas. His work has appeared in Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of the AIS, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, MIS Quarterly Executive, and others. He is Associate Editor of the European Journal of Information Systems and International Journal of Electronic Commerce and serves the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Service Research. WILLIAM J. KETTINGER (bill.kettinger@gmail.com) is the William S. Lee Distinguished Professor of Information Systems at Clemson University. He previously served at the FedEx Chair of Excellence in MIS at the University of Memphis. Bill has published extensively including 4 books, over 80 refereed journal articles in such journals as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, JMIS, JAIS, EJIS, ISJ, Decision Sciences, and Sloan Management Review. He currently serves as a Senior Editor of MISQ Executive, Senior Editor Emeritus at MISQ and serves, or has served, as an Associate Editor of MISQ, ISR and JAIS and has three times served as a special editor for JMIS. His research interests include: strategic information management; platforms and digital business strategy; IS management & service quality; IT and the supply chain; and process management. ALI SUNYAEV (sunyaev@kit.edu) is Professor for Applied Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. Previously, he was Professor at the University of Kassel and the University of Cologne. Dr. Sunyaev received his Ph.D. in Information Systems from the Technische Universität München. His research interests focus on reliable, secure, and purposeful software and information systems within the scope of critical infrastructures, innovative health IT applications, cloud computing services, and information security solutions. His research appeared in journals including Journal of Information Technology, Journal of the AIS, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, Communications of the ACM, and others. His research work has been featured in a variety of media outlets. TILL J. WINKLER (winkler@cbs.dk) is an Associate Professor of Information Technology (IT) Management and Digitalization in the Department of Digitalization at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Prior to obtaining a Ph.D. in Information Systems from Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, he worked as a management consultant at Capgemini’s Chief Information Officer Advisory Services. His research on IT governance, cloud computing, and digital health has been presented at major Information Systems conferences and appeared in journals including Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly Executive, Health Policy and Technology, and others. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals. IntroductionCloud computing is an evolution of computer technology and a dominant business model for delivering information technology (IT) infrastructure, components, and applications. With cloud computing, a product-centric model for IT provisioning is transformed into a global, distributed, service-centric model, leading to a disruptive shift from IT-as-a-product to IT-as-a-service [4, 24]. Cloud computing enables individuals and organizations to access IT resources on-demand, from any platform or device at any time as a measured service [32]. Cloud providers offer an ever-increasing number and variety of services that are built on a shared pool of computing resources and able to elastically scale to growing computing demands. Market researchers predict the public cloud market to hit US$ 236 billion by 2020, a growth of 23 percent from 2014 [16]. Defying initial concerns, the move toward cloud computing proceeds with unrelenting force, changing the way we collaborate, co-create, and do business. We rely on cloud services in our daily lives, for example, for messaging (e.g., WhatsApp), collaborating in teams (e.g., Asana), managing businesses (e.g., SAP ByDesign), and playing games online (e.g., GamingAnywhere). Cloud computing also provides the infrastructure that has powered other key digital trends including mobile computing, the internet of things, big data, and artificial intelligence, thereby accelerating industry dynamics, disrupting existing business models, and fueling the digital transformation [7, 22]. Today, cloud computing has become a critical IT infrastructure for almost all aspects of our everyday lives, and it will continue to transform the world we live in on multiple levels and in various ways. While the interest in cloud computing has continued undiminished, the focus of research has been primarily on adoption, operational issues, and cloud computing impacts on IT value. Researchers have intensively studied individuals’ and organizations’ cloud service adoption [3, 5, 8, 20, 27, 34, 37] and usage intention [6] as well as the suitability of incentives in cloud service contracts [41]. Other research has analyzed the role of cloud computing as an enabler for organizations to become more agile and adapt to changes [2] and how to organize IT functions when using cloud services [10, 47]. Related streams of research have analyzed cloud business models [18, 26, 35] and cloud service supply chains [13], as well as pricing and licensing models for cloud service offerings [9, 30]. Technologically focused literature addresses the issues of cloud service security by evaluating the security environment and proposing technical safeguards [1, 11]. Despite these important advances, prior research has dedicated far less attention to the transformative and value-creating capacity of cloud computing. We understand the transformative value of a technology as the realized or unrealized potential that widespread diffusion of this technology leads to fundamental and large-scale innovations that benefit individuals, organizations, markets, and societies. Transformative value sets itself apart from traditional dimensions of IT value that largely focuses on the economic value of IT within or between specific firms or organizations. Due to its inherent capabilities (e.g., on-demand self-service, resource pooling, elasticity, and extensibility), cloud computing exhibits transformative mechanisms that enable truly innovative services and business models, ultimately creating a wealth of possibilities for individuals, teams, organizations, and societies. To guide future research in cloud computing, this Special Section Introduction presents a framework for research, the Transformative Impact of Cloud Computing (TICC) framework. The TICC framework delineates IT value from transformative value and describes three key mechanisms through which cloud computing capabilities, individually and in combination, generate transformative impacts (hereafter referred to as transformative mechanisms): (1) decoupling, (2) platformization, and (3) recombination of services. We first evaluate how the transformative mechanisms arise from each of the technical layers of cloud computing (i.e., infrastructure resources, components, and applications). Then, we analyze and extrapolate how each of the transformative mechanisms leads to impacts on individuals, organizations, and societies/economies (i.e., hereafter also referred to as the real-world layers). We close by presenting an agenda for future research and mapping the three papers included in this Special Section to the Transformative Impact of Cloud Computing (TICC) framework. Acknowledgment The first and third author gratefully acknowledge financial support for this work by the German Research Foundation (DFG) (Grant/Award Number: BE 4308/3-1, BE 4308/4-1, SU 717/10-1) and the Dr. Werner Jackstädt‐Stiftung (Grant/Award Number: 010103/56300720). References 1.August, T.; Niculescu, M.F.; and Hyoduk, S. Cloud implications on software network structure and security risks. Information Systems Research, 25, 3 (2014), 489–511. 2.Battleson, D.A.; West, B.C.; Kim, J.; Ramesh, B.; and Robinson, P.S. Achieving dynamic capabilities with cloud computing: An empirical investigation. European Journal of Information Systems, 25, 3 (2016), 209–230. 3.Benlian, A. Is traditional, open-source, or on-demand first choice? Developing an AHP-based framework for the comparison of different software models in office suites selection. European Journal of Information Systems, 20, 5 (2011), 542–559. 4.Benlian, A.; and Hess, T. 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Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2009)
The deployment of information systems (IS) continues to play a vital role in the shaping and implementation of corporate strategy. This is obvious, considering the progressing digitization of products and processes, as the ever new business models founded on the Internet-Web combine to compete with the traditional models as well as with the old new models created just a decade or so ago. The Special Section on Competitive Strategy, Economics, and Information Systems, guest edited by Eric K. Clemons, Robert J. Kauffman, and Thomas A. Weber, is a comprehensive body of research work on the subject. Several of the papers of the Special Section apply a range of techniques from economics and strategy analysis to study the effectiveness of e‑commerce business models, the business value of alternative sourcing strategies, and the value of large-scale enterprise IS. Others investigate the economically effective choice of alternative security policies and of incentive alignment in the intraorganizational knowledge transfer. Some of the papers offer general, broadly applicable, results, while others present contextualized, middle-range work. Taken together, the section presents a rich spectrum of opportunities, trade-offs, and methods of investigation. The guest editors introduce the papers in more detail. The first paper of the general section, by Anjana Susarla, Anitesh Barua, and Andrew B. Whinston, addresses the environment of software‑as‑a-service outsourcing, an increasingly popular alternative to other IS governance models. The structure of the contract between an application service provider and its client firm can make a difference between a costly failure and a success. A variety of contract arrangements is employed in the field. The authors study empirically the alignment factors between the contract terms and the contingencies of a given situation through the lens of transaction costs. They are able to provide normative results that will serve the users and providers of these services. In the highly fluid business environment of recent times, there has been investigative and pragmatic interest in swift trust: a precognitive form of trust that precedes the actual familiarity with the fellow team members--and with their trustworthiness. Well-placed trust is obviously a good thing in team collaboration, in particular within virtual teams. Here, Lionel P. Robert Jr., Alan R. Dennis, and Yu‑Ting Caisy Hung investigate empirically the factors that can lead to the formation of swift trust. They further study the interplay between the initial reserve of swift trust and the formation of knowledge-based trust, earned--or not--by the actual behavior of the team members. Of particular interest are the results comparing the face-to-face team trust dynamics with those of virtual teams. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1986)
This article presents an introduction by the editor to this issue, which focuses mainly on cost control of information systems.

Special Issue: Database Management - Adam, Nabil R (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1987)

Special Issue: Creating Social Value with Information - Giboney, Justin Scott; Briggs, Robert O; Nunamaker Jr, Jay F (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2017)
JUSTIN SCOTT GIBONEY (justin_giboney@byu.edu; corresponding author) is an assistant professor of information technology at Brigham Young University. He received his Ph.D. in management information systems from the University of Arizona. His research focuses on behavioral information security, deception detection, and knowledge-based systems. He has published numerous papers related to information security, deception detection, and decision support. ROBERT O. BRIGGS (rbriggs@mail.sdsu.edu) is a professor of information systems at San Diego State University. He earned his doctorate in management information systems at the University of Arizona. He researches the cognitive foundations of collaboration and uses his findings to design new collaborative work practices and technologies. He is a cofounder of the collaboration engineering field and coinventor of the ThinkLets design pattern language for collaborative work processes. He has designed collaboration systems and collaborative workspaces for industry, academia, government, and the military. He has published more than 200 scholarly works on collaboration systems and technology, addressing issues of team productivity, technology-supported learning, creativity, satisfaction, and technology transition. JAY F. NUNAMAKER JR. (jnunamaker@cmi.arizona.edu) is Regents and Soldwedel Professor of MIS, Computer Science and Communication and director of the Center for the Management of Information and the National Center for Border Security and Immigration at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in operations research and systems engineering from Case Institute of Technology. He has held a professional engineer’s license since 1965. He was inducted into the Design Science Hall of Fame and received the LEO Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Information Systems. He was featured in the July 1997 issue of Forbes Magazine on technology as one of eight key innovators in information technology. His specialization is in the fields of system analysis and design, collaboration technology, and deception detection. The commercial product GroupSystems ThinkTank, based on his research, is often referred to as the gold standard for structured collaboration systems. He founded the MIS Department at the University of Arizona in 1974 and served as department head for 18 years. An information system is, by definition, “A way to create value with information” [1, p. 2]. It is common in business to equate value with money—revenue, expenses, and the bottom line. Monetary value, however, is but one of several kinds of value we can create with information. Among the others are:Social value—relationships among individuals to one another and to society Political value—power, influence, and the ability to prevail in a conflict Cognitive value— time- and attention-constrained mental resources in the knowledge economy Emotional value—positive/negative affect, for example, satisfaction, entertainment, therapy Physical value—safety, health, comfort, and well-being. A given information system (IS) may create more than one kind of value. A search engine creates cognitive value for users by granting instant access to information, and monetary value to the advertisers who fund it. Health-care informatics create physical value for patients and cognitive value to health-care professionals by facilitating their interactions. Theaters and theme parks use information systems to create emotional and physical value for their patrons. People will sacrifice monetary value to gain value in the other categories, so many information systems create monetary value as well. As we create information systems, then, we can ask not only “What kind of value should we create with this information system?” but also “What other kinds of value could we create with the same information?” Because IS can create value beyond the monetary, all six categories of value should be of central concern to IS research and practice. It would therefore be useful to single out each of the nonmonetary categories for focused consideration. Toward that end, this special issue focuses on a single nonmonetary category: social value. Two of the articles in this issue address using information to create social value pertaining to relationships among individuals, such as mutual understanding, credibility, and trust. In their article, “Beyond Brainstorming: Exploring Convergence in Teams,” Isabella Seeber, Ronald Maier, Gert-Jan de Vreede, and Barbara Weber, examine the ways teams converge. Convergence comprises two elements: (a) how individuals on a team move from less to more shared understanding of the concepts with which they work; and (b) how they move from having many concepts to a focus on fewer ideas they deem worthy of further attention. The article proposes an approach to measuring the quality of a convergence process, which is a valuable contribution upon which many other researchers may build. It then reports a detailed investigation of how variations in the structure of the convergence process relate to convergence quality of an idea set, and group-member satisfaction with the converged idea set. Steven J. Pentland, Nathan W. Twyman, Judee K. Burgoon, Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., and Christopher B.R. Diller build and test an automated system for interviewing crime suspects and assessing their credibility in their article, “A Video-Based Screening System for Automated Risk Assessment Using Nuanced Facial Features.” The study provides evidence that, under the conditions of the automated interviews, guilty subjects tend to freeze their expressions and hold them unchanged when they lie, but allow their expressions to vary more when they tell the truth. Innocent people tend not to freeze their expressions. It may be possible to generalize the technology to other settings where it is essential to assess a person’s credibility. Three other articles in the special issue touch on using information to create social value at the societal level, focusing variously on renewable energy, cyber security, and risk factors in safety management systems. Jan-Hendrik Piel, Julian F.H. Hamann, André Koukal, and Michael H. Breitner, in their article, “Promoting the System Integration of Renewable Energies: Toward a Decision Support System for Incentivizing Spatially Diversified Deployment,” tackle the society-level challenge of deciding where to locate renewable energy power plants. Renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind generation, tend to be intermittent; they are affected by the weather and can drop off line suddenly. If sources are concentrated in one geographic area, changes in local weather conditions can cause this sudden drop off line, potentially impairing the stability of the entire electricity grid. Following a design-science research approach, the study develops a model for optimizing the geographic placement of renewable sources and evaluates the model with a simulation. The article contributes a nascent design theory for identifying favorable special distributions of renewable energy capacity. In their article, “Exploring Emerging Hacker Assets and Key Hackers for Proactive Cyber Threat Intelligence,” Sagar Samtani, Ryan Chinn, Hsinchun Chen, and Jay F. Nunamaker Jr. propose a step toward reducing the $445 billion global loss per year due to cyber attacks. Many cyber security initiatives focus on analyzing attacks after they happen to derive advice for the future. This work develops a proactive approach to better understanding the present threats, and mitigating them in anticipation of an attack. It uses an automated approach to collect and analyze vast amounts of malicious hacker tools from underground hacker communities. The study shows that it is possible to discover numerous malicious assets such as crypters, keyloggers, web exploits, and database exploits, which makes it possible to develop defenses against them before they are used in attacks. Donghui Shi, Jian Guan, Jozef Zurada, and Andrew Manikas seek to improve public safety, for example, in aviation, in their article, “A Data-Mining Approach to Identification of Risk Factors in Safety Management Systems.” The study uses a machine-learning algorithm to analyze the unstructured text of daily incident reports to identify and analyze 170,000 incident reports from the U.S. Federal Aviation Safety Board. The approach reduces the need for extensive manual identification of risk factors, and addresses the challenge of incomplete data. They compared three different algorithms and report their relative strengths and limitations with respect to these tasks. The approach also demonstrates a more general capability—that a topic mining algorithm can produce useful inputs for a machine-learning classification model. The final study addresses an issue of IS for social value with implications for individuals and for society. “Information Security Control Theory: Achieving a Sustainable Reconciliation between Sharing and Protecting the Privacy of Information,” by Chad Anderson, Richard L. Baskerville, and Mala Kaul examines the trade-off between the expected benefits and the potential security risks of having immediate and complete information shared within and between organizations, for example, in health care, law enforcement, or commerce. The article reports a study of four iterations to develop and test a theory of information security control based on a balance between exposure controls (e.g., to prevent hacking) and ethical controls (e.g., policies and laws with consequences for violations). The findings suggest that practitioners may be able to use the theory to find a balance between openness and protection that aligns with their specific, local information goals. Each of the articles in this special issue originated in a presentation nominated for a best-paper award at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Each reveals a different facet of creating social value with information systems. We commend them to your reading. Reference 1.Nunamaker, J.F., Jr., and Briggs, R.O. Toward a broader vision for information systems. ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, 2, 4 (2011), 20:1-20:12.

Special Section: Competitive Strategy, Economics, and Information Systems - Clemons, Eric K; Kauffman, Robert J; Weber, Thomas A (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2009)
Eric K. Clemonsis Professor of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His education includes an S.B. in Physics from MIT, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University. He has been a pioneer in the systematic study of the transformational effects of information on the strategy and practice of business. His research and teaching interests include strategic uses of information systems, the changes that IT enables in the competitive balance between new entrants and established industry participants, transformation of distribution channels, the structure and governance of the IT functional area, and the impact of IT on the risks and benefits of outsourcing and strategic alliances. Industries of focus include international securities markets and financial services firms, consumer packaged goods retailing, and travel. He specializes in assessing the competitive implications of IT, and in managing the risks of large-scale implementation efforts. Dr. Clemons is the founder and project director for the Wharton School’s Sponsored Research Project on Information: Strategy and Economics Within the Program for Global Strategy and Knowledge Intensive Organizations. He recently participated in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (February 2009). He is currently a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Management Information Systems and International Journal of Electronic Commerce. Dr. Clemons has 35 years’ experience on the faculties of Wharton, Cornell, and Harvard, and consulting experience in the private and public sectors both domestically and abroad. Robert J. Kauffmanis the W.P. Carey Chair in Information Systems at the W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, where he has joint appointments in IS, Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Informatics and Computer Science. He has a B.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder, an M.A. from Cornell University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon. He has served on the faculties of New York University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Rochester, and worked in international banking and finance in New York City. He is also a past chair of the Department of Information and Decision Sciences of the Carlson School of Management, and director of the MIS Research Center at the University of Minnesota. His research interests span the economics of IS, financial markets, technology adoption, competitive strategy and technology, IT value, strategic pricing and technology, supply chain management, and theory development and empirical methods for IS research. He has won numerous research awards, including the 2006 Outstanding Research Contribution award for modeling and strategic decision-making research on embedded standards in technology-based products from IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management and the 2007 Best Research award from the Journal of the Association of Information Systems for theory-building research in the area of product and market transparency made possible by IT. His recent paper on the diffusion of multiple generations of wireless mobile phones was nominated for a Best Research award at the 2008 International Conference on Information Systems. His publications have appeared in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Organization Science, Telecommunications Policy, Information Technology and Management, Decision Sciences, and other leading journals. Thomas A. Weberis an Assistant Professor in the Management Science and Engineering Department of Stanford University, where he is conducting research on optimal control of nonlinear systems, economics of information and uncertainty, analysis of complex systems, and corporate strategy and public policy. He holds undergraduate diplomas in Industrial and Electrical Engineering from Ecole Central Paris and the Technical University Aachen, as well as M.S. degrees in Technology Policy and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. He also received an M.A. in Operations and Information Management and a Ph.D. in Management Science and Applied Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. During 2008, he was a visiting faculty member at the University of Cambridge. He was previously a senior consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. He was also recently the recipient of the David Morganthaler II Faculty Scholarship at Stanford. His research interests involve the economics of information and uncertainty, and how social systems can be modeled, designed, and controlled in the presence of uncertainty. He has been developing new theoretical models and methods that have the potential to change the way in which we approach social systems, and integrate different levels of analysis. His published papers have appeared in Information Systems Research, Decision Support Systems, Economics Letters, Economic Theory, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, and Optimal Control Applications and Methods. Information technology (IT) continues to play a key role in the creation and exploitation of opportunities for innovative competitive strategy. This Special Section of Journal of Management Information Systems presents research that explores new interactions between technology and competitive strategy, offering both new strategies and new analyses of strategies that have previously been proposed. Its coverage is quite broad, including, for example, the future of advertising and innovative online business models, and investments in medical imaging technologies for health-care organizations. It also includes research on personalization strategies in e‑commerce and information security for Internet users. Other research explores how firms go about making IT investment decisions when there is significant uncertainty regarding the business value of emerging technologies. Two papers explore making outsourcing decisions. Eric K. Clemons’s paper on "Business Models for Monetizing Internet Applications and Web Sites: Experience, Theory, and Predictions" opens this Special Section. During the past several years, the author has explored the diminishing role of advertising as a revenue generator for online enterprises and the need for alternative online business models. On April 6, 2009, in a New York Times "Idea of the Day" article titled "News Is Dying Because Advertising Is Dying," Tom Kuntz paraphrased Clemons’s [7] recognition of a dramatic change in the digital economy. He wrote: "Behind the demise of traditional media in the Internet age is the utter failure of the advertising on which they mistakenly relied. . . . The Web ‘shatters’ traditional advertising because users don’t need it. They have better ways to find information about what to buy" [21]. In the present paper, Clemons expands his analysis to focus on potential online business models that are not based on advertising. He reports on two categories: (1) Web sites that sell virtual things, including some virtual product, experience, content, information gathered from online experiences, or online service, and earn revenues from the sale, and (2) Web sites that charge for access to consumers in the form of misdirection, social search, or contextual mobile advertising. His analysis supports predictions for future business successes, based on the competitive strategy literature as well as observations of current company strategies, that enable us to gain a clearer understanding of how monetizable different business models on the Internet will be in the future. The study of the implementation of IT in health-care organizations is an important new application area for information systems (IS) research that involves the business value and effects of emerging technology investments [12, 19]. In the second paper of this Special Section, "An Empirical Investigation of the Value of Integrating Enterprise Information Systems: The Case of Medical Imaging Informatics," Moshe Ayal and Abraham Seidmann report on a longitudinal study they conducted at viaHealth/Rochester General Hospital in Rochester, New York. The hospital deployed new diagnostic imaging and archiving systems that integrated with the organization’s ongoing efforts to deploy electronic medical records to support the care of its patients. The new technologies included the implementation of a radiology information system (RIS) and a picture archiving and communication system (PACS). The authors use empirical analysis methods for estimating the business value of RIS/PACS in the health-care business process context based on the measurement of related financial revenues, clinical operating process lead times, and subjective satisfaction levels by the clinical staff and referring physicians. The authors document a rapid learning rate for the systems, with the associated outcome of an immediate and significant clinical process lead time improvement immediately after the systems were deployed to achieve integration with Rochester General Hospital’s electronic medical record system. They also measure the satisfaction level of referring physicians who used the full spectrum of RIS/PACS functionalities at Rochester General Hospital or at their own clinics; the results show higher than the average level of satisfaction for the referring physicians. A well-known issue in traditional and e‑commerce retailing is the extent to which products should be personalized to the desires and needs of the firm’s potential consumers, who search for them in different ways [6, 10, 22, 27, 29]. The third paper of this Special Section is related to this general theme. Sunil Wattal, Rahul Telang, and Tridas Mukhopadhyay authored "Information Personalization in a Two-Dimensional Product Differentiation Model." The authors propose a quality-fit ratio to represent a consumer’s strength of preference for quality compared to his or her preference for product fit. They develop a game-theoretic duopoly model to analyze the competitive interaction of information personalization and product differentiation. They find that both firms have an incentive to personalize their products in equilibrium when the costs of providing quality and the costs of product misfits are low. Otherwise, as long as the effectiveness of product personalization reaches at least some threshold value, one firm personalizes while the other firm relies on standard product marketing. The resulting equilibrium is generally asymmetric in the sense that one firm’s personalization strategy does not necessarily guarantee a higher profit than the other firm, only a higher profit than the alternative of both firms not personalizing. The authors offer interesting practical examples for the different market scenarios. An important related problem for consumers and firms that operate their businesses on the Internet is information security [16, 17, 23]. In "Information Security: Facilitating User Precautions Vis‑à‑Vis Enforcement Against Attackers," Ivan P.L. Png and Qiu‑hong Wang investigate information security policies that encourage Internet users to take appropriate precautions and that result in enforcement against hackers. The authors focus on large-scale mass attacks and more narrowly targeted attacks on the Internet. Their core perspective is to recognize how Internet users and data privacy attackers strategically interact. Their analysis results show that both facilitating end-user precautions and increasing the enforcement rate decreases the attackers’ efforts, so a higher enforcement level can lead to reduced user precautions in equilibrium. Thus, when there are sufficient corporate or government deterrents in place, enforcing laws will only have a positive effect if Internet users continue to take a reasonable level of precaution with information privacy. The authors offer useful managerial and policy contributions through additional analyses of how Internet user precautions and deterrence policies are differentially attractive for fending off hackers when the costs of attacks and precautions vary, and when users place different valuations on data security. Over the years, JMIS has showcased quite a few papers that have been instrumental in developing the current perspectives on IT investment decision making under uncertainty in the IS discipline [2, 4, 8, 9, 13, 20, 26]. The next paper in the Special Section, "Effects of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Transfer on Investment Decisions Under Uncertainty," treats similar issues, albeit from a fresh and new perspective. Xianjun Geng, Lihui Lin, and Andrew B. Whinston investigate the conditions under which uncertainties about emerging technologies get resolved over time. Their key premise is that organizational learning may not be evenly distributed. As a result, firms must deal with the fact that different individuals in the firm may not equally share in the benefits of such learning, with the result that their knowledge of the potential outcomes of investing in innovative IT may not be complete. The authors formulate the problem in game-theoretic terms and examine the conditions under which such knowledge may be ineffectively transferred, resulting in inefficient IT investment decisions. The next paper in this Special Section was contributed by Hoon S. Cha, David E. Pingry, and Matt E. Thatcher and is on another topic that has also been often studied by authors who have published in JMIS--IT outsourcing [3, 25, 28]. Their paper is titled "A Learning Model of Information Technology Outsourcing: Normative Implications." The authors note a significant concern on the part of the clients of vendors that provide business process outsourcing services: the extent to which they may lose the opportunity to learn about how technology can be used to improve their productivity and coordination capabilities within their businesses. Most firms would like to retain their proprietary knowledge about their business processes and the associated intellectual property [1]. To study these issues, the authors formulate a normative model for optimizing the rate of IT outsourcing that enables them to analyze the interaction among operational knowledge, production costs, and coordination costs, and their effects on firm outsourcing strategy. This information is then used to determine a firm’s optimal rate of IT outsourcing. A key finding of this research involves the optimality of two extreme strategies. The authors find that clients should either totally outsource or totally insource their business processes, based on how rapidly their knowledge of how to best coordinate their operations depreciates. They also show that partial outsourcing decisions are appropriate when the client is able to acquire operational process knowledge from the outsourcing services vendor. With papers such as this, we see the new insights that are beginning to emerge from the IS discipline’s efforts to help define the emerging area of services science [5, 18, 24]. The Special Section closes with a paper titled "The Unified Procurement Strategy for Enterprise Software: A Test of the ‘Move to the Middle’ Hypothesis," by Robert J. Kauffman and Juliana Y. Tsai. The authors explore the predictions of the "move to the middle" hypothesis of Clemons et al. [11] in the context of the consolidation of the enterprise software industry. The authors describe unified procurement, the relatively new practice that occurs when a firm buys all compatible products and services for its enterprise software stack from a single vendor. The authors apply transaction cost economics, in particular its recognition of the importance of opportunism risk as a consideration that firms must effectively manage when they get involved in buyer-supplier IT outsourcing relationships. Managing this risk enables them to indemnify themselves against a host of possible forms of exploitation and undesirable losses of proprietary information. In this research, the authors focus on the extent to which risk can be transferred from the client to the vendor, especially the technology risks and the costs for integrating the complementary capabilities of the enterprise software stack [14]. The authors report that unified procurement practices are being driven by changes in IT and firm and industry structure in the presence of transferred risk, the influence of transaction cost economics, and increasing industry clockspeed. They represent the main results of their research through a series of theory-driven propositions for the enterprise software procurement context. They present this approach as an example of middle range theory development [15]. This refers to theory that has a limited scope of application and can lead to testable hypotheses in specific application contexts. This is becoming increasingly recognized as an effective means for developing theory on the basis of the study of a specific context rather than the entirety of a business phenomenon. The authors validate their results through a series of industry mini-cases from software vendors and their clients on their implementations of enterprise software stacks. We thank the many individuals who made contributions to our efforts on the Competitive Strategy, Economics, and Information Systems Mini-Track at the 2009 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), and to this Special Section. Our first thanks go to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscripts that we developed for HICSS 2009, and then again for this Special Section. Ting Li assisted by developing feedback for the authors based on their HICSS presentations to give them support for the first of their postconference revisions. Juliana Tsai also provided detailed editorial suggestions on many of the Special Section papers as we brought them to their final form for publication. We thank Vladimir Zwass for his encouragement and editorial input on the development of this Special Section for the Journal of Management Information Systems. References 1. Aron, R.; Clemons, E.K.; and Reddi, S. Just right outsourcing: Understanding and managing risk. Journal of Management Information Systems, 22, 2 (Fall 2005), 37-56. 2. Bardhan, I.; Bagchi, S.; and Sougstad, R. Prioritizing a portfolio of information technology investment projects. Journal of Management Information Systems, 21, 2 (Fall 2004), 33-60. 3. Bardhan, I.; Whitaker, J.; and Mithas, S. Information technology, production process outsourcing, and manufacturing plant performance. Journal of Management Information Systems, 23, 2 (Fall 2006), 13-30. 4. Benaroch, M.; Jeffery, M.; Kauffman, R.J.; and Shah, S. Option-based risk management: A field study of sequential information technology investment decisions. Journal of Management Information Systems, 24, 2 (Fall 2006), 103-140. 5. Chaudhury, A.; Nam, K.; and Rao, H.R. Management of information systems outsourcing: A bidding perspective. Journal of Management Information Systems, 12, 2 (Fall 1995), 131-159. 6. Clemons, E.K. How information changes consumer behavior and how consumer behavior determines corporate strategy. Journal of Management Information Systems, 25, 2 (Fall 2008), 13-40. 7. Clemons, E.K. Why advertising is failing on the Internet. TechCrunch (March 22, 2009) (available at www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why- advertising-is-failing-on-the-internet/). 8. Clemons, E.K., and Gu, B. Justifying information technology investments: Balancing the need for speed of action with certainty before action. Journal of Management Information Systems, 20, 2 (Fall 2003), 11-48. 9. Clemons, E.K., and Weber, B. Strategic information technology investments: Guidelines for decision making. Journal of Management Information Systems, 7, 2 (Fall 1990), 9-28. 10. Clemons, E.K.; Gao, G.G.; and Hitt, L.M. When online reviews meet hyperdifferentiation: A study of the craft beer industry. Journal of Management Information Systems, 23, 2 (Fall 2006), 149-171. 11. Clemons, E.K.; Reddi, S.; and Row, M. The impact of information technology on the organization of economic activity: The "move to the middle" hypothesis. Journal of Management Information Systems, 10, 2 (Fall 1993), 9-36. 12. Devaraj, S., and Kohli, R. Information technology payoff in the health-care industry: A longitudinal study. Journal of Management Information Systems, 16, 4 (Spring 2000), 41-68. 13. Dos Santos, B. Justifying investment in new information technologies. Journal of Management Information Systems, 7, 4 (Spring 1991), 71-90. 14. Gao, L.S., and Iyer, B. Analyzing complementarities using software stacks for software industry acquisitions. Journal of Management Information Systems, 23, 2 (Fall 2006), 119-147. 15. Gregor, S. The nature of theory in information systems. MIS Quarterly, 30, 3 (September 2006), 611-642. 16. Hann, I.H.; Hui, K.L.; Lee, S.Y.T.; and Png, I.P.L. Overcoming online information privacy concerns: An information-processing theory approach. Journal of Management Information Systems, 24, 2 (Fall 2007), 13-42. 17. Johnson, M.E. Information risk of inadvertent disclosure: An analysis of file-sharing risk in the financial supply chain. Journal of Management Information Systems, 25, 2 (Fall 2008), 97-124. 18. Kauffman, R.J., and Sougstad, R. Risk management of contract portfolios in IT services: The profit-at-risk approach. Journal of Management Information Systems, 25, 1 (Summer 2008), 17-48. 19. Khoumbati, K.; Themistocleous, M.; and Irani, Z. Evaluating the adoption of enterprise application integration in health-care organizations. Journal of Management Information Systems, 22, 4 (Spring 2006), 69-108. 20. Kumar, R.L. A framework for assessing the business value of information technology infrastructure. Journal of Management Information Systems, 21, 2 (Fall 2004), 11-32. 21. Kuntz, T. News is dying because advertising is dying. New York Times (April 6, 2009) (available at http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/why-advertising-is-failing-on-the-internet/). 22. Mithas, S.; Ramasubbu, N.; Krishnan, M.S.; and Fornell, C. Designing Web sites for customer loyalty across business domains: A multi-level analysis. Journal of Management Information Systems, 23, 3 (Winter 2006-7), 97-127. 23. Png, I.P.L.; Wang, C.Y.; and Wang, Q.H. The deterrent and displacement effects of information security enforcement: International evidence. Journal of Management Information Systems, 25, 2 (Fall 2008), 125-144. 24. Richmond, W.B., and Seidmann, A. Software development outsourcing contracts: Structure and business value. Journal of Management Information Systems, 10, 1 (Summer 1993), 57-72. 25. Saarinen, T., and Vepsalainen, A. Procurement strategies for information systems. Journal of Management Information Systems, 11, 2 (1994), 187-208. 26. Taudes, A. Software growth options. Journal of Management Information Systems, 15, 1 (Summer 1998), 165-186. 27. Telang, R.; Rajan, U.; and Mukhopadhyay, T. The market structure for Internet search engines. Journal of Management Information Systems, 21, 2 (Fall 2004), 137-160. 28. Tiwana, A., and Bush, A.A. A comparison of transaction cost, agency and knowledge-based indicators of IT outsourcing decisions: A U.S.-Japan cross-cultural field study. Journal of Management Information Systems, 24, 1 (Summer 2007), 259-300. 29. Weber, T.A. Delayed multi-attribute product differentiation. Decision Support Systems, 44, 2 (2008), 447-468.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2015)
The papers in the Special section on Cognitive Perspectives on Information Systems that opens this issue of the Journal of Management Information Systems are unified by the common idea of its title: Each of them centers on an aspect of cognition in relation to a nodal information systems (IS) issue. The issues range from information-security violations, ethics breaches, and system vulnerabilities to the use of predictive analytics for phishing detection and knowledge filtering in the online communities of practice. The Guest Editor, Robert O. Briggs, introduces the Special section to you in greater detail. Three papers in the general section study the interaction between IS and online consumer behavior. In the first of these, Gediminas Adomavicius, Jesse Bockstedt, and Shawn P. Curley investigate the effects of the bundling of digital goods on consumers’ variety seeking. It has been known that the buyers of consumable goods seek more variety when those goods are bundled rather than when they are being acquired sequentially. The present authors show that this effect does not hold in the case of digital goods and theorize the reasons for this dissimilarity. The result has clear implications for practice. The theoretical analysis the authors provide also expands our horizons in the generalized knowledge of consumer behavior, as more and more of it is enacted in the acquisition of digital products. Continuing the theme of consumer behavior, Cheng Yi, Zhenhui (Jack) Jiang, and Izak Benbasat study the effect of the interactivity of online product presentation on attracting buyers to the presented products. The authors design their experiment around experience products and ground their work in the theories of flow and cognitive absorption. They show that product presentation with restricted interaction (as opposed to non- or full interaction) engages potential buyers more deeply and entices them to seek out the presented products offline more readily. Aside from contributing to the theory of online consumer behavior, this result may contribute to resource economies by online retailers. Abhijeet Ghoshal, Subodha Kumar, and Vijay Mookerjee seek to establish how recommender systems affect the competition between firms that do offer these facilities to the consumers (“personalizing firms”) and those that do not. Since the consumer is free to buy from a firm of either of the two types after using a recommender, the personalizing firm’s recommender might lose its acumen over time as fewer data points are acquired owing to this balking. The formal game-theoretic analysis presented here shows how the use of the recommenders by the personalizing firms influences the prices and profits of both types of firms. The results presented by the authors may lead smaller online retailers to the conclusion that free riding on the larger retailers’ recommenders is a favorable strategy. Online social networks (OSNs) have deep impacts on the psyches of their users, and we still do not fully understand many of them. For example, how does this use affect the sense of loneliness? Sabine Matook, Jeff Cummings, and Hillol Bala review the contradictory findings of their predecessors in this research domain and present the results of their own investigation of OSNs as tools for relationship management. The authors show that the individuals’ relationship orientation, active engagement, and willingness to disclose private information in the OSN context can have a salutary influence on their perceptions of loneliness. The study also demonstrates how certain OSN features can lead to such an outcome. These findings showcase once again the contribution our discipline can make to the contextualized understanding and effective use of information technology. This perspective can be taken also on the findings presented by Norman A. Johnson and Randolph B. Cooper in the final paper of the issue. We can see from this work how the use of instant messaging (IM)—as compared to audio channels—can lead to an increased gain in negotiations. The laboratory experiment indicates that the use of IM can more readily extract ending concessions from the opposing negotiators. Since, as the authors point out, negotiation software is now beginning to be provided online for some categories of products and marketplaces, this result is of general importance in the consumer as well as the organizational domains. This is the time to remember Sandra Slaughter, our author and a member of our Editorial Board. The outpouring of emotions on her passing was a statement of Sandy’s great worth as a colleague, a friend, and a human being. The work she has published, the countless papers of others she tirelessly worked on over the years as editor and reviewer, will last. There will be scholarly meetings and publications in her memory and devoted to the analysis and continuation of her work. And her memory will live in our scholarly community. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Special Issue: Organizational Impact of Group Support Systems, Expert Systems, and Executive Information Systems - Nunamaker Jr, Jay F; Sprague Jr, Ralph H (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1993)

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1994)
The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Steven Sheetz, David Tegarden, Kenneth Kozar, and Ilze Zigurs on group decision support systems and cognitive mapping and another by Joseph Valacich and Alan Dennis on a mathematical model for performance.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2017)
The Special Section that opens this issue of the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS) is titled “Technological Innovations for Communication and Collaboration in Social Spaces” and is guest edited by Eric K. Clemons, Rajiv M. Dewan, Robert J. Kauffman, and Thomas A. Weber. With a broad interpretation of its title, the section presents five studies that analyze how the online social spaces enabled by the Internet-Web have become host to new ways of value creation and customer interaction, with the attendant opportunities to be exploited and problems to be handled. The guest editors introduce the articles. They also offer an encompassing and penetrating framework that expands our understanding of the information-driven changes in our organizations and society. The framework lays a foundation for a research program that should enable us to affect these changes positively through information-based strategies. The two articles that open the general section of the issue address the effects of the deployment of information technology (IT) in health care. For a great variety of reasons, we still have very much to do in this area, where the proper infusion of IT could yield great beneficial outcomes. MedTech, as it is now known, has much to offer all of us—not least owing to the long-time neglect of this domain. Indeed, the first of the studies empirically shows the impacts on the quality of care of the integration of IT across health-care providers, from physicians to hospitals and pharmacists. Alain Pinsonneault, Shamel Addas, Christina Qian, Vijay Dakshinamoorthy, and Robyn Tamblyn present a theory-driven analysis of an elaborate two-year-long natural experiment investigating the effects of IT integration in the ambulatory care setting. The researchers find that the quality of care has been positively affected, including the indirect positive impact via the continuity of care. This finding and the more granular results offered by the study showcase the urgency of health-care IT integration. IT has also vastly expanded health-care delivery channels, which now include various forms of cocreation of value with recipients. In online health-care communities (OHC), physicians and other professionals share their knowledge with patients. Why should they? There are many and various motivators of cocreation [2]. Shanshan Guo, Xitong Guo, Yulin Fang, and Doug Vogel adopt a professional capital perspective and adapt the social exchange theory to explain the social and economic returns on physicians’ participation in these communities. The authors dichotomize the professional capital into its status and decisional components and proceed to show the nature of these gains through the empirics on a specific OHC. The subject of our special section is echoed in the next study. Hillol Bala, Anne P. Massey, and Mitzi M. Montoya empirically study the effect of the use of collaboration technologies on the outcomes of this collaboration. Specifically, the researchers focus on the use of these technologies in new product development (NPD) in the setting of a major pharmaceutical company. They find that the process orientations adopted during the use of collaboration technologies (e.g., exploitation, exploration, or ambidexterity) significantly influence the outcomes, such as several capabilities conducive to high organizational performance. Based on these results, the authors offer helpful advice to NPD managers. Online social network sites (SNS) exert a major influence on the way we live our lives, and on the way we perceive and express our identity. Our need to belong expresses itself in various ways in our social network activities, some of them confirming Immanuel Kant’s plaint about the “crooked timber of humanity,” from which nothing straight can be ever fashioned. In the next article in this issue, Tabitha L. James, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Linda Wallace, and Merrill Warkentin use Facebook data to study the interdependence between our need for belongingness and SNS addiction, which can be captured clinically as obsessive-compulsive disorder. By unpacking the gratification sought with SNS use, the researchers offer a detailed understanding of the factors that can lead to unhealthy SNS participation. The results obtained can help counteract ill use of SNS, not least by evolving the design of the sites. It is worth noting that the negative effects of obsessive-compulsive use of SNS have been analyzed as a result of imbalance between the two thinking systems (“fast and slow”) in work published in the preceding issue of JMIS [1]. That study has received wide coverage in the media, an indicator of the importance of the topic—and of the results. In the concluding article, Matthew L. Jensen, Michael Dinger, Ryan T. Wright, and Jason Bennett Thatcher present and empirically verify a novel technique to improve the organizational training necessary to counteract phishing attacks. Aside from deleterious effect on the lives of the affected individuals, phishing attacks open systems to comprehensive security breaches. We have come to realize that a multipronged program is necessary—and long overdue—to establish information security as a mandatory attribute of all organizations. Information systems (IS) security should be considered a key part of IS functionality. Considering the prevalence and the regrettable effectiveness of phishing (the “crooked timber” again), new counteraction ideas are needed. In that vein, the authors show how mindfulness techniques can follow and go beyond rule-based training to forestall these attacks. The work can clearly be expanded to counteract social engineering in general and enhance broader behavioral security programs. At this time, we all remember our colleague Ralph H. Sprague Jr., one of the founders of our field. Ralph was a founder of the domain of decision support systems that has now morphed into business analytics. For 40 years, he chaired the Hawaii Conference on Systems Sciences. He was the founding chair of the Information Systems Department at the University of Hawaii. He was also a guest editor of several special issues of JMIS, which contained some of the foundational studies in our discipline. It is obvious that we in the field of information systems owe much to the untiring work and mind of Ralph Sprague.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2006)
The relationship between producers and their customers and, in particular, producers and consumers, has been undergoing a profound change over recent decades. The change has deepened and its pace has accelerated since the Web–Internet compound has become the ever more significant nexus for the relationships between the producers and their present and potential consumers. The relative power of consumers has grown, driven by two contemporaneous forces, as the proliferation of the Web has coincided with the major constituents of the world’s population joining the global division of labor, globally oriented consumption, and global competition. It is of great interest to us here that the consumers have become more active participants in their relationship with the producers. This relationship has expanded beyond the exchange and its shared facilitation (say, via self-service) into the production process itself. A well-defined, and highly visible, consumer segment has been participating in the actual creation of marketable value. In this co-production process, the division between producers and consumers has become a semipermeable membrane, with the osmosis invading the task zone previously occupied exclusively by the producers. The detailed analysis of the ramifications of this sea change is a task for another day (which I hope to find available). Several key factors need a mention here. Information and telecommunication technologies have become—in several major ways—the impetus and the continuing force of change. The nature of products has changed. Information goods are claiming an ever larger share of the product spectrum. Beyond that, many physical products have been morphed into a package of product-service-information. With information products, be they software, massively multiplayer online games, or blogs, the consumers are in possession of the means of production and of the requisite knowledge. With the Internet–Web compound as an interactive medium and a medium of relationships among the potential consumers, these individuals are in a position to self-organize into production collectives, with varied, yet effective, personal motivations. The acculturation to the permanently unfinished information products, be they Wikipedia, open source software, or a blog, and to the active individual participation in their production, is the vital cultural change propelling the developments in co-production. It can be safely said that the innovation imperative of today’s organizations necessitates activation of customers as co-producers of value to one degree or another. It is apparent from the forces, enablers, and impacts of this transformation that our field has vital contributions to make in the understanding of this change. With the deeper understanding, further innovation will come. The organizational information systems (IS) are changing internally as they are driven by the mandate to center on the customer, and as they assimilate such organizational innovations as open source development or wiki-based communications. The organizational processes and systems will also change as their owners need to open up not only to their organizational partners, but to the various user communities whose participants become customers and, indeed, co-producers of value. The Special Section on Customer-Centric Information Systems, guest-edited by Ting-Peng Liang and Mohan Tanniru, addresses a number of issues attendant on this momentous reorientation. The authors of the four papers in the Special Section empirically study several nodal aspects of the transformation. They offer theoretically based and empirically verified conclusions about a variety of means of personalized connections with customers over Web interfaces. In their introduction to the Special Section, the Guest Editors offer their framework for the study of customer-centric IS, as well as introduce the papers of the Section. Strategic alignment between a firm’s business direction in its competitive context, on the one hand, and the strategic plans for the firm’s information technology (IT), on the other, is known to be a precondition for positive business impacts. In turn, a number of antecedents of this alignment have been researched, and some of them have even been implemented in various organizations. Knowledge-based theory of the firm, viewing it is as the nexus of a dynamic capability for knowledge integration, is deployed here by Grover S. Kearns and Rajiv Sabherwal to study an effective alignment. The researchers find empirically that specific processes and behaviors aimed at corporate knowledge management, and the development of common knowledge and understandings between the business and IS executives, lead to beneficial alignment results. Project-level planning is found to be a significant component of the overall alignment process. Enterprise architecture (EA) standards aim to evoke firm-wide compliance with the common infrastructure, data repositories, and applications supporting the core business processes. When used properly, such standards can lead both to economies of nonreplication and reuse and to corporate agility in responding to opportunities or threats from high IT platforms. Here, Wai Fong Boh and Daniel Yellin study how firms that are reasonably advanced in their implementation of EA standards govern their introduction and maintenance, and to what effect. The authors also investigate the principal governance mechanisms through which the standards can lead to an effective utilization of organizational IT resources. With IT-enabled virtual teams playing a major role in work organization, two papers in this issue study the performance of such teams. Mark A. Fuller, Andrew M. Hardin, and Robert M. Davison empirically analyze the collective efficacy of teams spanning three continents. The authors develop and validate the measure of virtual team efficacy. The work will help in diagnosing the presence of efficacy sources in a team and in effectuating timely remedies when required. Necessary as they are in contemporary work organizations, globally distributed teams face inherent challenges. They cross over a number of boundaries, and the virtuality is generally not an advantage, with its relatively impoverished human contact. These challenges are at the source of conflicts, many of them counterproductive. Here, Atreyi Kankanhalli, Bernard C.Y. Tan, and Kwok-Kee Wei offer and validate a model of the sources and consequences of conflict within global virtual teams. Both works will help in creating IT-based and other interventions when deficiencies are found. The models and the instruments presented here will be a foundation for further research on the effectiveness of globally distributed virtual teams. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are gaining traction in supporting supply chains and webs spanning various industries. The Web services, that is, the software components deployed in SOA, have their own supply chains, grounded in the incentives extended to and by various suppliers and intermediaries. In their paper, Qian “Candy” Tang and Hsing “Kenneth” Cheng analytically study the optimal pricing strategy of a monopolistic intermediary that facilitates the marketplace of Web services. Since the intermediaries providing technological services and aggregation of complementary Web services are highly active in these marketplaces, the work is relevant to the further development of both the specialized supply chains for Web services and the industry supply chains these facilitate. Organizational knowledge management (KM) is the subject of research presented by Uday R. Kulkarni, Sury Ravindran, and Ronald Freeze. These authors develop and empirically validate a model of success of organizational KM that incorporates both the supply side (contribution of the explicit knowledge) and the demand side (reuse of the supplied knowledge). The model is quite comprehensive in going well beyond the usually considered motivation factors to the quality of KM systems and their content. The integration of various research approaches represented in the model lays the groundwork for much of the further work on KM. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2018)
This thirty-fifth volume of JMIS opens with the important Special Issue devoted to “Financial Information Systems and the Fintech Revolution.” The Special Issue brings to us six studies that illustrate what our field can contribute to the understanding and progress of a key phenomenon in the advanced information age we all live in. The guest editors, Peter Gomber, Robert J. Kauffman, Chris Parker, and Bruce W. Weber, have distinguished themselves as the thought leaders in the field both through their research and practice. The guest editors will introduce to you the articles they have included in the Special Issue, each of which makes a significant novel contribution to our knowledge about various aspects of financial information systems. The financial technology (fintech) emerging on the foundation of the Internet-Web has been driving a fundamental change to the financial sector of our economy. The massive connectivity, the almost universal mobile accessibility, the computational capabilities growing exponentially in “the second half of the chessboard” driven inexorably by Moore’s law, the progress in artificial intelligence since its turn toward deep learning, are all mutually reinforcing and underwrite the Fintech Revolution we are witnessing. The revolution has been intensifying over past two decades, if we wish to date its origins to the launch of PayPal as a person-to-person (P2P) payment platform in 1998. As it is with revolutions, things change gradually and then suddenly, to repurpose the words of Ernest Hemingway. Fintech startups, funded largely by venture capital (VC, another aspect of the modern financial sector), have led the charge. Indeed, several properties of VC make it especially suited to financing the uncertain investments in these startups: taking equity stakes rather than debt; and pooled investment in sequential tranches well-aligned with the rapid scalability of the intangibles-based businesses [1]. The fintech startups have innovated notably in areas such as payments and transaction processing; retail and investment banking; lending; insurance; international remittances; and advisory and money management. Among the direct major changes we see at present is the emergence of blockchain technology as a distributed ledger without central control that is becoming an infrastructure for many asset-management systems and potentially has the larger future in smart contracts and, indeed, reorganizing the foundations of organizations as we know them. The incumbent banks, relying (and sometimes overrelying) on the advantages of bigness, resist the future of becoming utilities delivering commodity services to the upstart startups that would own the profitable client relationships. New and powerful phenomena such as nonbank banks, direct equity placements, crowdfunding, and ubiquitous touch points supported by the Internet of Things, are gaining scale and threatening to elude the traditional banks. Indeed, cryptocurrencies, whether Bitcoin, Ethereum, or one of their successors, may threaten the banks of issue. The existing banks are not sleeping at the switch, of course. The advantages of bigness, such as various forms of very considerable capital, scale of relationships with customers and clients, economies of scale and scope, and access to the lawmaking and regulatory processes, are always there. Innovation can be brought in by the acquisition of or partnership with truly innovative smaller companies, or fostered by attempting to adopt their ways. Citigroup, a leader among the mega-banks, has created Citi FinTech, as a skunkworks operation that is meant to instill financial innovation throughout the bank. Several banks have acquired robo-advisor startups and trading platforms, among other forms of fintech. The victors and the vanquished remain to be seen; the multifocal change is the only thing that is certain. There is one thing we know about revolutions: The outcomes cannot be foretold. The financialization of our economy makes the present and future impacts of the Fintech Revolution reverberate throughout all industries. We can see that the massive gales of change are bringing inclusion to the unbanked, with identity systems, microcredit, and e-payments such as M-Pesa, and ubiquitous access via smartphones. We can see that it threatens many categories of well-populated and well-paying jobs. We hope to see that it will bring more new job categories that can offer many good workplaces. As the articles included here in the Special Issue show, our discipline has much to offer to the understanding and, we hope, further development of fintech. In consequence, we can serve larger societal causes: expanding the inclusion of individuals in economic life and bridging digital divides, reducing friction and rents that hamper economic growth, and enhancing our experience as individuals in our financial lives. As can be seen here, Journal of Management Information Systems stands ready to provide leadership in the study of fintech. In the first article in the general section, Taha Havakhor and Rajiv Sabherwal study virtual teams working on knowledge-intensive tasks, which they term virtual knowledge teams (VKT). In such units, exemplified by software-development teams, the coordination of expertise held by individual members is crucial to project success, while being challenged by geographical distribution and limited familiarity among the team members. The researchers investigate the mechanisms and processes through which information technology (IT) supports coordination of expertise and leads to enhanced team performance. The contribution of the study goes beyond its stated scope to showcase the processes that support IT deployment in knowledge-intensive work. In e-commerce, social product-customization systems enable consumers to receive the opinions of their peers in the product configuration process to meet their own requirements. Input from others may be received either privately or publicly (via message boards). How influential is the input from peers? Is privately rendered input of greater consequence than that offered publicly? How do these factors influence the consumer’s evaluation of the customized product they receive? These are the issues investigated empirically by Tobias Schlager, Christian Hildebrand, Gerald Häubl, Nikolaus Franke, and Andreas Herrmann. The authors bring to bear theories of thinking styles and social impact to tease out the influential factors in a field study and four experiments. Their results contribute to the theories they deploy and have pragmatic value for online commerce. Consumer reviews are a fundamental tool with which individuals cocreate value in e-commerce. They have been broadly used and intensely researched. As the reviews aggregate, they can increase the value of vendors and products, they can facilitate the selling process and decrease returns. They can also do the opposite—and here, deceptive reviews can be the deciding factor. The detection of such reviews is of great value to all involved in e-commerce. It is also difficult owing to the multiple and quite sophisticated methods of review manipulation. The authors of the concluding article in the issue, Naveen Kumar, Deepak Venugopal, Liangfei Qiu, and Subodha Kumar, deploy a machine-learning algorithm in order to consider multiple factors that help in review classification. The specific technique the researchers devise is hierarchical supervised learning that allows them to surface anomalies in the deceptive reviews. The technique itself is important, as would be the gain in platform confidence, should the method be applied to separate the wheat from the chaff. The authors demonstrate that their method is superior to what we now have. As we begin the new volume of the Journal of Management Information Systems, it is my pleasure and privilege to thank our referees, the primary guarantors of the quality of the journal. Here are their names: Ahmed Abbasi Marc Adam Ashish Agarwal Hyung Jun Ahn Manju Ahuja Tolga Akcura Oliver Alexy Muhammad Aljukhadar Gove Allen Paul Alpar Niek Althuizen Kemal Altinkemer Naveen Amblee Corey Angst Ofer Arazy Kursad Asdemir Norman Au Yoris Au Benoit A. Aubert David Avison Peter van Baalen Hyunmi Baek Akhilesh Bajaj Hillol Bala Dirk Baldwin Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay Youngsok Bang Gaurav Bansal Reza Barkhi Henri Barki Jordan Barlow Richard Baskerville Genevieve Basselier Dinesh Batra Daniel Beimborn D. France Belanger Skip Benamati Michel Benaroch Izak Benbasat Alexander Benlian François Bergeron Ganesh Bhatt Sudip Bhattacharjee David Biros Ivo Blohm Jesse Bockstedt Riccardo Bonazzi Antal van den Bosch Indranil Bose Tobias Brandt Nicola Breugst Glenn J. Browne Sebastian Bruque Scott Buffett Burcu Bulgurcu Judee Burgoon Andrew Burton-Jones Ashley Bush Brian Butler Terry A. Byrd Sonia M. Camacho Jinwei Cao Lan Cao Hasan Cavusoglu Hsin-Lu Chang Young Bong Chang Mohamed-Hédi Charki Sutirtha Chatterjee Michael Chau Patrick Chau Aihui Chen Andrew Chen Daniel Chen Guoqing Chen Hong-Mei Chen Hsinchun Chen Jianqing Chen Jin Chen Kay-Yut Chen Kuan Chen Li Chen Liwei Chen Rui Chen Hsing Kenneth Cheng Xusen Cheng Mike Cheung Robert T.H. Chi Roger Chiang Benjamin Chiao Ananth Chiravuri Chaochang Chiu Jong-min Choe Ben Choi H. Michael Chung Sunghun Chung Wingyan Chung Theodore H. Clark Isabelle Comyn-Wattiau Randolph Cooper Robert E. Crossler Kevin Crowston Qizhi Dai John D’Arcy Elizabeth Davidson Gregory Dawson Jason Dedrick Benedict Dellaert Chrysanthos Dellarocas Haluk Demirkan Tianjie Deng Xuefei Deng Amit Deokar Sarv Devaraj Debabrata Dey Jens Dibbern Su Dong Tianxi Dong Line Dubé Peter Duchessi Alina Dulipovici Deborah E. Dunkle Kaushik Dutta Robert Easley Dana Edberg Christophe Elie-Dit-Cosaque Aaron Elkins Mike Eom Sean B. Eom J. Alberto Espinosa Andrea Everard Kelly Fadel Ming Fan Patrick Fan Xiao Fang Yu-Hui Fang Yulin Fang Dennis Fehrenbacher Rei Fen Jane Feng Daniel R. Fesenmaier Thomas A. Fischer Jerry Fjermestad Chris Forman Chiara Francalanci Mike Friedman Johann Füller Brent Furneaux John Gallaugher Gordon Gao Hong Gao Monica Garfield Rajiv Garg Ina Garnefeld Edward J. Garrity Abhijeet Ghoshal Janis L. Gogan Kim Huat Goh Thomas Goh Sigi Goode Dale Goodhue Anand Gopal Ram D. Gopal Nelson Granados Peter Gray Dawn G. Gregg Shirley Gregor Ulrike Gretzel Robert K. Griffin Michael D. Grigoriades Bin Gu Ken Guo Xunhua Guo Zhiling Guo Saurabh Gupta Nicole Haggerty Jungpil Hahn Ingoo Han Kunsoo Han Shu Han Il-Horn Hann Andrew Hardin Matthew Hashim Taha Havakhor Irina Heimbach Cheng-Suang Heng Raymond Henry Hemantha Herath Tejaswini Herath Traci Hess Alan R. Hevner Oliver Hinz Susanna Ho Richard Hoffman Christian P. Hoffmann Jason Hong Kevin Hong Weiyin Hong Yili (Kevin) Hong Zhe Hong John A. Hoxmeier Jeffrey Hu Nan Hu Paul Hu Petra Hu Qing Hu Chun-Yao Huang Ming-Hui Huang Shiu-Li Huang Wayne Huang Xiaowen Huang Thomas Huber Kai Lung Hui Wendy Hui Ard Huizing Ghiyong Im Gretchen I. Irwin Anja Ischebeck Varghese Jacob Bharat A. Jain Hemant Jain Jeevan Jaisingh Tabitha James Dietmar Jannach Jeff Jenkins Matthew Jensen James J. Jiang Qiqi Jiang Zhengrui Jiang Zhenhui Jiang Monica Johar Alice Johnson Eric Johnson Emmanuel Josserand Surinder Kahai Arnold Kamis Atreyi Kankanhalli P.K. Kannan Maurits Kaptein Prasanna Karhade Jahangir Karimi Michael Kattan Timothy Kayworth Weiling Ke Mark Keith Peter Kenning William J. Kettinger Lara Khansa Moutaz Khouja Melody Y. Kiang Byung Cho Kim Dan J. Kim Dongmin Kim Hee-Woong Kim Keongtae Kim Kihoon Kim Seung Hyun Kim Young-Gul Kim Ruth King Rajiv Kishore Gary Klein Richard Klein Sven Kleinknecht Stefan Knoll Cenk Kocas Chang Koh Rajiv Kohli Tobias Kollman Praveen K. Kopalle Kenneth A. Kozar Ramayya Krishnan Uday Kulkarni Akhil Kumar Ram Kumar Subodha Kumar Jason Kuruzovich Juhee Kwon Simon S.K. Lam Guido Lang Karl R. Lang Kai R. Larsen Michael Lash Benjiang Lee ByungJoon Lee Byungtae Lee Daniel Lee Dong-Joo Lee Gene Moo Lee Goonwoong Lee Gwanhoo Lee Heeseok Lee Ho Geun Lee Jong Seok Lee Jungwoo Lee Thomas Lee Yang Lee Youngjin Lee Pierre-Majorique Léger Jan Marco Leimeister Chen Li Dahui Li Jiexun Li Mengxiang Li Seth Li Shengli Li Ting Li Weifeng Li Xiaotong Li Xin Li XinXin Li Xitong Li Yan Li Demin Liang Huigang Liang Nan (Peter) Liang Ting-Peng Liang Paul Licker John Lim Shi Ying Lim Aleck Lin Fu-ren Lin Mei Lin Zhijie Lin Charles Zhechao Liu Jun Liu Ying Liu Yipeng Liu Alexandre Lopes Paul B. Lowry Benjiang Lu Jingdu Lu Henry C. Lucas Jr. Stephan Ludwig Xueming Luo Andy Luse Christoph Lutz Mark Lycett Dan Ma Xiao Ma Jane M. Mackay Massimo Magni Pruthikrai Mahatanankoon M. Adam Mahmood Bin Mai Yogesh Malhotra Deepa Mani Ravi Mantena Kent Marett Panos Markopoulos Likoebe M. Maruping Anne P. Massey Lars Mathiassen Sabine Matook Kurt Matzler Kristina McElheran Ephraim R. McLean Nigel Melville Nirup Menon Thomas Meservy Randy Minas Shaila Miranda Dinesh Mirchandani Abhay Nath Mishra Stephanie Missonier Prasenjit Mitra Kannan Mohan William Money Ali R. Montazemi Ramiro Montealegre Alan Montgomery Greg Moody Jolene Morrison Barin N. Nag Fiona Nah Ravi Narayanaswamy Derek Nazareth Matthew Nelson R. Ryan Nelson Boon Siong Neo Derrick Neufeld Dirk Neumann Dorit Nevo Saggi Nevo Michael Newman Tingting Nian Mark Nissen Dmitri Nizovtsev Oded Nov Joo Hee Oh Lih-Bin Oh Onook Oh Wonseok Oh Bob O’Keefe Lorne Olfman James Oliver Benoit Otjacques Bob Otondo Peter Otto Eric Overby Zafer D. Ozdemir Gautam Pant Manoj Parameswaran Michael Parent Insu Park SungJune Park Craig Parker Bhavik K. Pathak Praveen Pathak Ravi Patnayakuni Souren Paul David J. Pauleen Kenneth Peffers Robin Pennington Christoph Peters Chee-Wei Phang Roger A. Pick Selwyn Piramuthu Huseyin Polat Jean-Charles Pomerol Jaana Porra Constance Porter Clay Posey John H. Prager David Preston Jeffrey Proudfoot Sandeep Purao Jessica Pye Hamed Qahri-Saremi Liangfei Qiu Lingyun Qiu Wen Guang Qu Xin Xue Qu Arik Ragowsky Rex Kelly Rainer Jr. Balaraman Rajan Vandana Ramachandran Arkalgud Ramaprasad Bala Ramesh R. Ravichandran Gautam Ray Louis Raymond Blaize Horner Reich Bruce Reinig Fei Ren Yuqing Ren Paul Resnick Hyuen-Suk Rhee Amir Riaz William B. Richmond Christoph Riedl René Riedl Lionel Robert Nicholas Roberts Michael Rogich Huaxia Rui Ko de Ruyter Sherry D. Ryan Young U. Ryu Michael Sacks Khawaja Saeed Rajib Saha Otavio Sanchez G. Lawrence Sanders Radhika Santhanam Pallab Sanyal Saonee Sarker Surendra Sarnikar Carol Saunders Kevin Scheibe George Schell Hans J. Scholl Petra Schubert Judy Scott Eric See-To Ravi Sen Sagnika Sen Sylvain Sénécal Alexander Serenko Nainika Seth Vikram Sethi Theresa M. Shaft Zhe Shan Tushar Shanker Jim Sheffield Hong Sheng Zhan Shi Hung-Pin Shih Siew Kien Sia Keng Siau Anna Sidorova Mark Silver Harpreet Singh Param Vir Singh Atish P. Sinha Sumit Sircar Bernd Skiera Stefan Smolnik Jaeki Song Scott Spangler William E. Spangler Rajendra P. Srivastava Shirish C. Srivastava Thomas F. Stafford Eric W. Stein Dennis Steininger Dick Stenmark Stefan Stieglitz Theofanis C. Stratopoulos Diane M. Strong Ayoung Su Mani Subramani Chandra Subramaniam Ramanath Subramanyam Eung-Kyo Suh Daewon Sun Heshan Sun Arun Sundararajan Shankar Sundaresan Juliana Sutanto Paul P. Tallon Chee-Wee Tan Chuan-Hoo Tan Yao-Hua Tan Xinlin Tang Mohan R. Tanniru Monideepa Tarafdar Nolan Taylor Orkun Temizkan Gary F. Templeton Hock Hai Teo Thompson Teo Matthew Thatcher Ferdinand Thies Dominic Thomas Ron Thompson James Y.L. Thong Ryad Titah Torrie Wu Tong Monica Chiarini Tremblay Manuel Trenz Dimitrios Tsekouras Yanbin Tu Ofir Turel Tuure Tuunanen Doug Twitchell Nathan W. Twyman Sonja Utz Rustam Vahidov Ganesan Vaidyanathan Goetz Viering Padmal Vitharana Radu Vlas Douglas Vogel Sebastian Voigt Jan vom Brocke Heinz-Theo Wagner Eric Walden Jeffrey Wall Joseph Walls Zhiping Walter Bin Wang Chong (Alex) Wang Eric T.G. Wang Jingguo Wang Michael S. Wang Qiu-Hong Wang Shouhong Wang Sophia Wang Weiquan Wang Yinglei Wang Y. Richard Wang Deepa Wani Sidne Ward Mary Beth Watson-Manheim Sunil Wattal Thomas Weber Chih-Ping Wei Markus Weinmann Tim Weitzel John Wells Robert West Jonathan Whitaker Michael E. Whitman Jeffrey L. Whitten George Widmeyer Rolf Wigand Fons Wijnhoven E. Vance Wilson Robert Winter Christopher Wolfe Christina Wong Charles A. Wood Hans Wortmann Ryan Wright Dazhong Wu Choon Ling Xia Lan Xia Mingdi Xin David Xu Heng Xu Hongjiang Xu Kefeng Xu Lizhen Xu Peng Xu Yunjie (Calvin) Xu Ling Xue Lucy Yan Yinping Yang Zhiyong Yang Oliver Yao Cheng Yi Denny Yin Zhitao Yin Byungjoon Yoo Yufei Yuan Wei T. Yue Fatemeh (Mariam) Zahedi Chun Zeng Dongsong Zhang Han Zhang Jennifer Zhang John Zhang Ping Zhang Xiaoquan Zhang Yulei Zhang Zhu Zhang Huimin Zhao Kexin Zhao J. Leon Zhao Kang Zhao Xia Zhao Dmitry Zhdanov Lina Zhou Wenqi Zhou Yilu Zhou Zhongyun Zhou Hongwei Zhu Wenqi Zhu Youlong Zhuang Moshe Zviran Let us now turn our attention to the papers.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 1991)
An introduction to several articles published within the issue is presented. Articles discussed include "Identification of Key International Information Systems Issues in U.S.-Based Multinational Corporations," by Candace Deans, Kirk Karwan, Martin Goslar, David Ricks, and Brian Toyne, "Adoption Patterns and Attitudinal Development in Computer-Supported Meetings: An Exploratory Study with SAMM" by Ilze Zigurs, Gerardine DeSanctis, and Julie Billingsley, and Globalization and Information Management Strategies," by Jahangir Karimi and Benn R. Konsysnki.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2004)
Several papers opening this issue of the Journal address various nodal aspects of e-commerce (used synonymously with a later term, e-business), in its business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C or e-tail), and intraorganizational deployment. In B2B commerce, business ecosystems lashed together by electronic linkages with increased efficiency and lowered transaction costs may lead to a participant firm’s loss of flexibility in partnering and product offering. The issue is addressed by Sanjay Gosain, Arvind Malhotra, and Omar El Sawy, who have performed an empirical study based on coordination theory to establish how different coping methods postulated by the theory relate to organizational outcomes. The study presents the critical normative guidelines for enterprise managers and sets a stage for further research on interorganizational coordination to pursue the desired efficiency–flexibility combinations. Based on a theory-guided analysis of corporate announcements, Rajiv Kishore, Manish Agrawal, and H. Raghav Rao study the sourcing and governance of large e-commerce projects. The authors have used an inclusive typology of project sourcing, which they relate to the strategic intent, the level of maturity of a given technology, and other factors behind the project’s weight and complexity. The results certainly go beyond the e-commerce ground, and can be deployed to study and manage complex technology projects. With the expanded range and complexity of sourcing options in the information technology domain, this work will certainly be further built on. Electronic communities enabled by the Internet–Web combine have emerged as a contributor to the health of e-commerce. Here, Xianjun Geng, Andrew B. Whinston, and Han Zhang study the health—stability and development—of the communities themselves. Using evolutionary game theory, these authors develop a model rooted in the notions of trust, reputation, and (dis)honesty of participants. Results regarding the conditions for the community’s well-being and proliferation are obtained. Having defined the notion of e-community’s health, the authors offer a model they and others can expand further. As the ultimate economic outcomes are of primary interest here, the authors point the way to using the model in order to determine whether a healthy e-community is worth maintaining for a specific purpose. Two subsequent papers deal with the informational aspects of e-tailing. Zhenhui Jiang and Izak Benbasat investigate virtual product experience in electronic shopping. Specifically, they study to what effect virtual control over the product’s image can be afforded the customer via the human–computer interface. Aiming to emulate the direct experience of the product, this mechanism enables the customer to manipulate product images (visual control) or its functions (functional control). In a laboratory experiment, the authors have established that the controls increase the extent to which the shopper perceives the interaction experience as helpful in product evaluation. The consequences are positive for both the utilitarian and hedonic aspects of shopping. Using the cognitive fit theory, Weiyin Wong, James Y.L. Thong, and Kar Yan Tam study the appropriateness of various information display formats for different shopping tasks. The work expands the domain of cognitive fit theory. It also produces specific and detailed recommendations for the design of transactional Web sites. In the first of two papers addressing group work in the information technology (IT) context, Souren Paul, Imad M. Samarah, Priya Seetharaman, and Peter P. Mykytyn Jr. study the aspects of harmony in virtual teams enabled by a group support system (GSS). More specifically, the authors focus on the collaborative versus individualistic orientation in intercultural teams as a factor in conflict resolution. They further relate this (dis)harmony to outcomes, such as perceived decision quality. Tom L. Roberts, Paul H. Cheney, Paul D. Sweeney, and Ross T. Hightower study the work of IT development groups. They focus on the influence of the project’s cognitive nature and complexity on the group interaction (with group harmony as one of the several factors). Several pragmatic guidelines emerge for managers regarding training and supervising the group effort on a project of a given nature. The potential synergy of the work of these two author teams is notable. As data mining is used more and more commonly, the performance of various mining methods has become important to corporate performance. Here, Atish P. Sinha and Jerrold H. May evaluate five widely used mining methods. The paper’s value is much enhanced by the richness of the performance criteria that the authors use. Sinha and May posit that the misclassification costs should be of primary concern in performance evaluation in data mining, and they add this criterion to several others they deploy. Going beyond the recommendations for a method selection, they show how existing mining routines can be tuned to make them sensitive to the costs of misclassification. A novel and valuable approach to conceptual database design is presented, with a prototype-based proof of concept, by Joobin Choobineh and Amber W. Lo. Deploying case-based reasoning, these authors describe the theory and design of a learning system that is domain independent. Experiments with the use of two prototype systems demonstrate the validity of the approach and, beyond that, indicate the preference of the user subjects for the use of the system proposed here. This is an important direction in database design automation. As the Journal’s activities expand, it is my pleasure and privilege to welcome to the Editorial Board of JMIS Bill C. Hardgrave of the University of Arkansas, Mark Keil of Georgia State University, and James R. Marsden of the University of Connecticut. Their participation will serve our field well. I also thank Albert Segars, whose tenure on the Board has been concluded, for his contribution. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief

Special Issue: Multiple Dimensions of Value in Information Systems - Briggs, Robert O; Nunamaker Jr, Jay F (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2013)
An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including economic values related to service expansion of information technology product companies, the effect of sentiment in reposting microblogs, and credibility assessment systems.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2009)
The Special Section presented here by its Guest Editors, Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., Ralph H. Sprague, and Robert O. Briggs, brings into focus the role information technology (IT) and the systems built around it play in managing the complexity of the world that surrounds us. IT was born of the need to control the complexity of industrializing economies [1]. Reflexively, IT has been the enabler of the complexity and turbulence of modern societies, organizations, and individual lives. The papers of the Special Section direct their research attention at contemporary phenomena born of IT such as crowdsourcing, virtual worlds, and blogging. They contribute theories and empirical analyses that will help us to understand, structure, and develop information systems (IS) that will be in many cases radical departures from the past. The Guest Editors introduce the contribution of each of the papers to you. The two papers in the general section of the issue study the effects of organizational IS. In the first, Arun Rai, Paul Brown, and Xinlin Tang frame theoretically and investigate empirically the impact of innovations in e‑procurement. Given the extent of disaggregation of organizational production processes, accompanied by outsourcing and offshoring of their components to process specialists and other sundry suppliers, the procurement function is crucial to the success---or lack thereof---of many firms. The research encompasses multiple types of major IT-based organizational initiatives and finds synergy among them; it also identifies the beneficial staging of the assimilation of these organizational innovations. Broadly framed, this work should impact the further research in the domain of organizational IT assimilation. Now more than ever (well, especially now), the economic benefits expected from IS are questioned closely. The work of Nirup M. Menon, Ulku Yaylacicegi, and Asunur Cezar analyzes these benefits via modeling based on the multiyear empirics in the hospital environment. The authors find that IS deployed in the primary, clinical, activities have a different longitudinal impact from those used for supporting the administrative activities. Particularly in the short (two-year) run, the economic benefits of the two types of systems differ sharply. These dichotomous effects should be studied in other industries and, if confirmed to apply broadly, will alter our notions of IT-based productivity. The results certainly will serve those responsible for budgetary allocations. As we enter the second quarter century of publication, it is with great pleasure that I wish to acknowledge the contribution of the JMIS referees. Along with the members of our Editorial Board, they are the primary guarantors of the Journal ’s quality and deserve our gratitude. Here are the names of the JMIS referees: Niv Ahituv Pervaiz Alam Gove Allen Paul Alpar Kemal Altinkemer Naveen Amblee Hayward P. Andres Dorine Andrews Kursad Asdemir Norman Au Yoris Au Benoit A. Aubert Sulin Ba Peter van Baalen Barbro Back Akhilesh Bajaj Dirk Baldwin Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay Ravi Bapna Indranil R. Bardhan Reza Barkhi Henri Barki Stuart J. Barnes Anitesh Barua Richard Baskerville Dinesh Batra Irma Becerra-Fernandez Skip Benamati Michel Benaroch Raquel Benbunan-Fich François Bergeron Hemant Bhargava Ganesh Bhatt Anol Bhattacherjee Jesse Bockstedt Wai Fong Boh Indranil Bose Robert P. Bostrom Nicola Breugst Paul Brown Glenn J. Browne Sebastian Bruque Jacek Brzezinski Scott Buffett Judee Burgoon Andrew Burton-Jones Ashley Bush Brian Butler Terry A. Byrd Engin Cakici Jinwei Cao Sven Carlsson William J. Carroll Huseyin Cavusoglu Susy Chan Yolande E. Chan Jerry Cha-Jan Chang Mohamed Hédi Charki Patrick Chau Ramnath K. Chellappa Hong-Mei Chen Hsinchun Chen Kay-Yut Chen Kuan Chen Yuanyuan Chen Hsing Kenneth Cheng Lei Chi Robert T.H. Chi Roger Chiang Alina M. Chircu Jong-min Choe Vidyanand Choudhary H. Michael Chung Wingyan Chung Theodore H. Clark Randolph Cooper Kevin Crowston Dianne Cyr Qizhi Dai Ronald Dattero Sergio De Cesare Didem Demirhan Sarv Devaraj Rajiv M. Dewan Debabrata Dey Peter Duchessi Deborah E. Dunkle Alexandra Durcikova Kaushik Dutta Omar A. El Sawy Sean B. Eom J. Alberto Espinosa Ming Fan Patrick Fan Xiaofen Fang Yulin Fang Steven Feiner Jane Feng Eliezer M. Fich Kirk Fiedler Edmond P. Fitzgerald Jerry Fjermestad Chris Forman Chiara Francalanci Mark Fuller Brent Furneaux Michael R. Galbreth John Gallaugher Dennis Galletta Dale Ganley Edward J. Garrity Judith Gebauer David Gefen Andrew Gemino Michiel van Genuchten Janis L. Gogan Kim Huat Goh Thomas Goh Jahyun Goo Dale Goodhue Ram D. Gopal Nelson Granados Peter Gray Ulrike Gretzel Robert K. Griffin Michael D. Grigoriades Bin Gu Kemal Guler Zhiling Guo Saurabh Gupta Jungpil Hahn Barbara Haley James A. Hall Ingoo Han Kunsoo Han Matthias Hänsel Paul Hart Khaled Hassenein Stephen Hayne Jun He Terrence Hendershott Alan R. Hevner Starr Roxanne Hiltz Richard Hoffman John A. Hoxmeier Pei-fang Hsu Jeffrey Hu Paul Hu Ming-Hui Huang Wayne Huang Kai Lung Hui Wendy Hui Ard Huizing Yujong Hwang Ghiyong Im Zahir Irani Gretchen I. Irwin Bala Iyer Varghese Jacob Bharat A. Jain Bao-Jun Jiang James J. Jiang Alice Johnson Linda Ellis Johnson Joni Jones K.D. Joshi Emmanuel Josserand Surinder Kahai Ajit Kambil Atreyi Kankanhalli P.K. Kannan Jahangir Karimi Michael Kattan Varol Kayhan Timothy Kayworth William J. Kettinger Omar E.M. Khalil Moutaz Khouja Melody Y. Kiang Sia Siew Kien Dan J. Kim Ruth King Rajiv Kishore Gary Klein Dong-Gil Ko Cenk Kocas Chang Koh Rajiv Kohli Tobias Kollman Sherrie Komiak Praveen K. Kopalle Marios Koufaris Kenneth A. Kozar Kenneth L. Kraemer Ramayya Krishnan Uday Kulkarni Akhil Kumar Chetan Kumar Ram Kumar Atanu Lahiri Karim Lakhani Simon S.K. Lam Nancy Lankton Karl R. Lang Nancy Lankton Tor J. Larsen Raymond Lau Gwanhoo Lee Heeseok Lee Ho Geun Lee Jae-Nam Lee Jungwoo Lee Thomas Lee Yang Lee Young Eun Lee Richard Leifer Jan Marco Leimeister Mary Jane Lenard Hugo Levecq Natalia Levina Dahui Li Jiexun Li Ting Li Xiaotong Li Xin Li Xinxin Li Ting-Peng Liang Paul Licker Stephen L. Liedtka John Lim Kai Lim Fu-ren Lin Ming Lin Yihwa Irene Liou Jacqueline Lipton Ying Liu Alexandre Lopes Paul B. Lowry Henry C. Lucas Jr. Mark Lycett Jane M. Mackay Simha R. Magal M. Adam Mahmood Yogesh Malhotra Arti Mann Ji-Ye Mao Salvatore T. March Nelson Massad Charles H. Mawhinney Jerrold H. May William McCarthy Roy McKelvey Ephraim R. McLean Nigel Melville Shaila Miranda Rajesh Mirani Dinesh Mirchandani Abhay Nath Mishra Prasenjit Mitra William Money Ali R. Montazemi Ramiro Montealegre Jolene Morrison Michael D. Myers Peter P. Mykytyn Jr. Barin N. Nag Fiona Nah Matthew Nelson R. Ryan Nelson Boon Siong Neo Derrick Neufeld Ralitza Nikolaeva Mark Nissen Dmitri Nizovtsev Wonseok Oh Bob O’Keefe Lorne Olfman James Oliver Benoit Otjacques Carl Pacini Raymond R. Panko Manoj Parameswaran Michael Parent Sungjune Park Craig Parker Bhavik K. Pathak Ravi Patnayakuni Souren Paul David J. Pauleen Paul A. Pavlou Kenneth Peffers Robin Pennington Francis Pereira Roger A. Pick Selwyn Piramuthu Huseyin Polat Jean-Charles Pomerol Gerald Post John H. Prager Sandeep Purao Lingyun Qiu Jim Quan Arik Ragowsky T.S. Ragu-Nathan Arun Rai Rex Kelly Rainer Jr. K. Ramamurthy K.S. Raman Arkalgud Ramaprasad B. Ramesh Richard G. Ramirez H.R. Rao R. Ravichandran T. Ravichandran Sury Ravindran Gautam Ray Louis Raymond Blaize Horner Reich Yuqing Ren Paul Resnick Hyuen-Suk Rhee William B. Richmond Daniel Robey Nicholas C. Romano Jr. Sherry D. Ryan Young U. Ryu Otavio Sanchez G. Lawrence Sanders Radhika Santhanam Pallab Sanyal Suprateek Sarker Surendra Sarnikar Carol Saunders George Schell Petra Schubert Judy Scott Ravi Sen Sylvain Sénécal Kishore Sengupta Nainika Seth Vikram Sethi Theresa M. Shaft Michael Shaw Jim Sheffield Olivia Sheng Morgan M. Shepherd Michael Shields Siew Kien Sia Keng Siau Mark Silver Param Vir Singh Atish P. Sinha Sumit Sircar H. Jeff Smith Toni M. Somers Jai-Yeol Son Jaeki Song Ryan Sougstad Scott Spangler William E. Spangler Rajendra P. Srivastava Thomas F. Stafford Stephen Standifird Sandy Staples Eric W. Stein Dick Stenmark Diane M. Strong Mani Subramani Chandra Subramaniam Girish Subramanian Ramesh Subramanian Ramanath Subramanyam Robert T. Sumichrast Shankar Sunarajan Arun Sundararajan Shankar Sundaresan Tae Kyung Sung Anjana Susarla Edward J. Szewczak Paul P. Tallon Yao-Hua Tan Xinlin Tang Mohan R. Tanniru Monideepa Tarafdar Nolan Taylor David P. Tegarden Gary F. Templeton James T.C. Teng Thompson Teo Jason B. Thatcher Matthew Thatcher Dominic Thomas Ron Thompson James Y.L. Thong Li Ting Amrit Tiwana Kerem Tomak Leon van der Torre Gregory E. Truman Yanbin Tu Ilkka Tuomi Ofir Turel Brad Tuttle Tuure Tuunanen N.S. Umanath Andrew Urbaczewski Rustam Vahidov Anthony Vance Viswanath Venkatesh Douglas Vogel Roumen Vragov Steven Walczak Zhiping Walter Bin Wang Eric T.G. Wang Jingguo Wang Michael S. Wang Qiu-Hong Wang Shouhong Wang Weiquan Wang Y. Richard Wang Molly Wasko Mary Beth Watson-Manheim Thomas Weber Chih-Ping Wei Charles E. Wells John Wells Larry West J. Christopher Westland Seungjin Whang Michael E. Whitman Jeffrey L. Whitten George Widmeyer Rolf Wigand Fons Wijnhoven Christopher Wolfe Charles A. Wood Hans Wortmann Amy Ping Wu Dazhong Wu Mu Xia Weidong Xia Hongjiang Xu Peng Xu Christopher Yang Mun Yi Byungjoon Yoo Yufei Yuan Wei T. Yue Fatemeh Zahedi Dongsong Zhang Han Zhang Jennifer Zhang John Zhang Michael Zhang Ping Zhang Zhu Zhang Zuopeng Zhang Huimin Zhao J. Leon Zhao Kexin Zhao Lina Zhou Yilu Zhou Hongwei Zhu Youlong Zhuang J. Christopher Zimmer Moshe Zviran Let us now read the papers. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief Reference 1. Beniger, J.R. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Editorial Introduction - Zwass, Vladimir (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2010)
The two papers opening this issue of JMIS present studies of collaboration enabled by information technology (IT). While their perspectives and specific subjects differ diametrically, taken together they advance our theoretical knowledge of the domain. Susan A. Brown, Alan R. Dennis, and Viswanath Venkatesh propose an integrated model of the adoption and continuing use of collaboration technology, combining the constructs from the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology with those of several theories of collaboration. The model has been validated in two field study settings with two collaboration technologies. Considering the explanatory and predictive promise of the unified model, it deserves extensive validation in future work. In the second paper, Ann Majchrzak and Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa study a very specific, and vital, collaboration context, that of ad hoc and temporary collaboration, based on rapid common sense-making among numerous organizational entities, typified by the handling of homeland security threats. A so-called safe context is needed to contain the access to and the use of information in such a setting. The authors use an information-processing model to explore the relationships between the factors ensuring a safe context and the participants' perception of the collaboration's success. The results indicate that the factors conditioning the safe context, such as the restrictions on the information use, do not have a uniform effect on the perceived success of the collaboration effort. The researchers discuss the revealed contingencies and offer practical suggestions on adjusting the information safety factors to the context of their application. Systems development projects can be governed by formal or informal control mechanisms, and they need simultaneously to aim at their planned targets and to be flexible enough to accommodate changing requirements. In his empirical study of outsourced projects, Amrit Tiwana argues that in the pursuit of this ambidexterity, the governance should employ a combination of the formal and informal controls, acting as complements and substitutes. The nuanced study, adapting several theoretical perspectives, explores the interaction among these control types and produces actionable guidelines on how to combine the achievement of a project's goals with the flexibility of the development process. Since the interorganizational project control is a vexed issue, the results offered here go well beyond a contribution to theory. Five subsequent papers contribute to our understanding and practice of e-commerce at various conceptual levels of that enterprise. Chrysanthos Dellarocas, Guodong (Gordon) Gao, and Ritu Narayan enhance our knowledge of the product-related consumer articulations on the Web. Product reviews, aggregated in various ways, are a vital component of co-creation, the creation of value by consumers. This value, generally freely offered, benefits the aggregators and the producers (as a collective entity). The research question here is: Do the consumers have the propensity to contribute reviews of already successful products (the Matthew effect) or those of niche products (the long tail)? Interestingly, the authors find, in the context of movie reviews, that the volume of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) is U-shaped, with the greater consequence, naturally, for the niche products. Although the overall economics of the long tail have been questioned recently, there is no doubt that the advice the authors are able to offer to the aggregators and other parties interested in the promotion of niche products is valuable. Along with eWOM, recommender systems are the principal native tools of consumer-oriented e-commerce. How do the recommenders affect sales? This is the question addressed by Bhavik Pathak, Robert Garfinkel, Ram D. Gopal, Rajkumar Venkatesan, and Fang Yin, who present an empirically grounded model that surfaces the power of these systems. Applying the model to the data sets of two e-tailers, the authors find that the strength of the recommendations positively affects sales and prices. Echoing the results reported for eWOM in the preceding paper, the present authors report that the use of recommenders reinforces the long-tail phenomenon. The results are important in showing that, far from racing to the price bottom predicted by the early analysts of electronic marketplaces, e-tailers have powerful tools at their disposal in controlling their markets. Another potential source of higher prices is analyzed by Bin Mai, Nirup M. Menon, and Sumit Sarkar in the next paper. These researchers show empirically that the display of a privacy seal by an e-tailer is correlated with charging higher prices as compared to the competitors without such a seal. Thus, the privacy evidence perceived by consumers has become another source of friction in the electronic marketplaces. A special type of online marketplace is the subject of research by Zafer D. Ozdemir, Kemal Altinkemer, Prabuddha De, and Yasin Ozcelik. The authors define and formally analyze the donor-to-nonprofit marketplaces as infomediaries that provide two-sided services: they offer to donors the data-based services that help them find the nonprofit with a desired mission while offering to nonprofits the fee-based accreditation and seal services (along with the access to donors). In other words, these intermediaries create a fund-raising marketplace. Their game-theoretic analysis leads the authors to the important conclusion that these marketplaces may lower the funds raised, accompanied by the formal results that surface a variety of incentives affecting the actors in these marketplaces. The rules of the game imposed on the infrastructure of e-commerce affect, most naturally, its economic outcomes. The preeminent rule is that of net neutrality, hotly contested by many infrastructure providers. Another---and related---contentious issue is that of the possibility of vertical integration of the broadband service providers (BSPs), that is, the actual providers of the Internet infrastructure, with content providers. It would appear obvious that, absent the mandatory net neutrality, an integrated service provider would have the incentive to favor its own traffic. Employing a game-theoretic analysis, the authors of the next paper offer a more textured view of the incentives that would prevail. Hong Guo, Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Hsing K. Cheng, and Yu?Chen Yang show that the social welfare would decrease in the absence of net neutrality combined with the presence of such vertical integration. What is truly interesting, they also show that the integrated service provider may have an incentive to prioritize the traffic of a competing content provider. These results will certainly contribute to the thinking of Internet policymakers. The methods of open source software (OSS) development have affected many aspects of organizational software development. According to the authors of the next paper in this issue, the internal open source (IOS), as the adoption of the OSS principles within a firm is called, can affect software reuse, an objective long sought. In a case study, Padmal Vitharana, Julie King, and Helena Shih Chapman examine an IBM program of participatory reuse, that is, a development process fully involving the potential reusers from the start. The program's effects are salutary and worthy of emulation. The authors induce a theoretical model explaining how IOS affects reuse, which will be of value to the future adopters of IOS---and to the future researchers who would want to generalize these results. The final paper in this issue offers an inclusive model of IT diffusion considered an innovation process. The inclusiveness of the model is in the fact that it considers three types of actors: the influentials (adopting autonomously), the opponents (inhibitors of adoption), and the imitators (whose behavior is affected by the other two groups). Thus, the authors, Hasan Cavusoglu, Nan Hu, Yingjiu Li, and Dan Ma, extend previously reported analyses that did not include the opponents. The opponents have the ability to stop the diffusion of innovation, slow the adoption process, or decrease the maximum rate of adoption. The authors show that this broader model has a much stronger power in explaining the path of an innovation as it more closely fits the empirical data. This model is an important generalized contribution---and a worthy closure for the issue. Vladimir Zwass Editor-in-Chief