This issue of the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS) opens its 43rd annual volume. The mission of the Journal has always been to present an integrated view of the leading research in our field, and the papers you will read here affirm that mission. Owing to our referees, members of our Editorial Board who serve as Associate Editors, and our editorial policies, JMIS has for years received high national and international recognition, with the membership in the FT50 list and the SCImago H-index of 177. We have always fostered research that leads our field to the future as mapped out not just by our scholarship, but by the great web of the international laboratories constituted by the tech and other companies and—in particular—the tech startups. Along with filtering the submissions through the editorial process, leading journals of the discipline need to foster future-oriented research.
Thus, two high-impact special collections are in preparation by our Guest Editors. A Special Issue on Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) as Driver of Change in Media is being guest-edited by Thomas Hess (University of Munich), Ioanna Constantiou (Copenhagen Business School), and Niki Panteli (Lancaster University). Notably, the purview of the research papers to be included is not only online media, but the overall present and future evolution (or revolution) of the media ecosystem driven by generative AI. The Special Section on Critical National Infrastructure is guest-edited by Jason Chan (University of Minnesota), Alan Dennis (Indiana University), Daniel Gozman (University of Sydney), and Kalle Lyytinen (Case Western Reserve University). As we face global instability, the stability of the critical national infrastructure is a key moment. Resilient and affordable infrastructure of systems and services underpins societal stability and progress, foundations of the economy, and the security of nations in our Westphalian global governance system. We all rely on it for leading the lives we have been accustomed to and for looking to a better future. The open calls for papers for both special collections are available on https://www.jmis-web.org/cfp.
Two papers opening the issue investigate nodal aspects of the adoption of AI. The most immediate and broad concern that requires thorough and forward-looking investigation is the impact of generative AI (GenAI) on jobs. The first paper, by Dandan Qiao, Huaxia Rui, and Qian Xiong, contributes to the multidisciplinary effort aimed at forecasting this momentous impact. The authors frame their research around the productivity (augmentation)-substitution duality of AI effects, where we seek answers to the question: To what extent will AI, as it moves toward general AI, enhance human productivity and support jobs as opposed to becoming a substitute for humans in the labor force? The authors’ approach is innovative in its granularity as they analyze the impact on different labor markets. Qiao et al. theorize a generalized inflection-point framework, with the productivity enhancement from the use of GenAI preceding the substitution of human labor by machines at a certain point in time. The inflection points are specific to the different categories of labor markets. The work is an important contribution to our understanding of the expanding phenomenon the global society is facing. We can expect this effort will be built upon by future broader studies.
Organizations are relying already, and will rely increasingly in the future, on decisions made by AI. There are multiple challenges contained in this statement. A principal one is the alignment between the organization’s avowed policies and the recommendations (or, perhaps, actual decisions) made by AI-based systems. This is the subject investigated by Maryam Ghasemaghaei in the next paper in the issue. Basing herself in the theories of trust and psychological contract, the researcher shows that the misalignment between the organizational “talk” and the algorithmic “walk” can lead to the breach of trust and have knock-on negative effects in the workplace. This is a thorny issue. As we know, one of the characteristics of AI as we know it today is the opacity of its decision-making, or decision-recommending, premises. The paper provides actionable recommendations both on increasing the alignment and on managing the employees’ expectations with respect to AI.
Software systems last a long time, ultimately containing only a fraction of the original code; however, they still contain the long-ago developed code. At the heart of some of the in-house banking applications, some COBOL code may, and still do, abide. Obviously, the system functionality evolves with time. Over their long use periods, systems evolve both within the individual modules and in their interconnections. The development and maintenance teams evolve over time as well. Here, Amrit Tiwana and Hani Safadi present an ambitious integrative model of this co-evolution, with the objective of understanding the dynamics of synchronization between the teams and the software systems over a long period of time and with large volumes of code. In fact, the research is based on the econometric analysis of over 1,300 open-source systems, encompassing billions of lines of program code. The work is a significant contribution to the sociotechnical approach to software metrics that will help in the encompassing planning of large software systems.
Two subsequent papers are devoted to digital innovation, a potent driver of our contemporary economies. Ho Cheung Brian Lee, Yen-Yao Wang, Kangkang Qi, Vallabh Sambamurthy, and Jocelyn D. Evans study the inefficiencies in the venture-capital (VC) allocation with the gender lens. As we know full well, countries that are able to maintain efficient VC flow to the apparently appropriate targets gain preeminent competitive advantage in the economies of today and tomorrow. The deregulation of capital markets has had a generally salutary effect on the access to VC. However, here the authors are able show that the VC allocation in the information-technology (IT) sector has been gender-biased and that the present deregulation regime amplifies this bias. Economic inefficiencies that affect IT entrepreneurs actually affect the progress in IT and, further, the competitiveness of the economies.
In the next paper, Hui Peng, Yaobin Lu, and Xin (Robert) Luo dichotomize digital innovation into an outcome and a process in order to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of innovation on firm performance. As we read the paper, it does turn out that this separation is fruitful in understanding the differential impacts and the interaction between the two aspects of digital innovation. We do expect the complementarity surfaced here, but not the substitutive effects. The authors subject their findings to a variety of robustness tests and find them reliable. Together with the previous work, we have contributions that can help foster digital innovation across firms and economies.
Two-sided (seller-buyer) markets are well known for displaying positive cross-side network effects. Indeed, the higher the number of participants on the one side, the more value accrues to each participant on the other side. These markets are now generally platformized to provide convenient access to both sides of the transactions, as well as to other participants such as financiers or logistics firms. However, these markets can also display negative externalities, for example, when sellers with equal access to the platform offer more competitive terms to the buyers, or the large number of buyers decreases the transacting speed of the platform. With a game-theoretic economic model, Sumanta Singha, Rajib L. Saha, and Abhijeet Ghoshal study the options a platform has in such—generally occurring—markets with cross-side positive externality but same-side negative externality. The results are actionable and expand our understanding of this common type of platform.
Two subsequent papers significantly contribute to health informatics. Liuan Wang, Hillol Bala, Lu (Lucy) Yan, and Xitong Guo study health platforms, two-sided platforms attended by physicians and potential or actual patients. The contributions by physicians, generally busy professionals, are crucial to the platforms’ success. The contributions may be reactive, in response to the patients’ queries, or proactive, disseminating health-related information. Physicians’ motivation to contribute, in the absence of meaningful direct economic or administrative incentives, is the research question here. The authors find empirically that some herding cues (such as gender or affiliation, among others) and feedback types (such as online reviews or award) have a rather nuanced effect on the physicians’ willingness to contribute to the healthcare platforms.
In most healthcare systems, there exists a persisting overload of the system by patients seeking help or advice. This is particularly so during adverse conditions, such as a pandemic or above-average climate temperatures. At present, the AI-assisted online healthcare systems can relieve pressures on the brick-and-mortar medical settings—if mildly ill patients avail themselves of such online services. Aihui Chen and Yaobin Lu identify three aspects of AI-based diagnostics and study their influence on the patients’ cognitive and affective trust. The results show that mildly ill patients may indeed accept online services—if they are designed to evoke trust, with the specific means identified by the authors for all the components of the diagnostics.
Corporate communications occur over a great variety of digital (and analog) media, with a surpassing speed of reaching an assortment of portals, forums, and platforms. Reducing information asymmetry obviously enhances the efficiency of the marketplaces. There are regulatory and peer pressures to disclose, beyond the obvious requirements of investors and business partners. However, in their strategic pursuits companies wish to preserve a degree of confidentiality of information, thus preventing their competitors from duplicating or attacking their strategic efforts. Hongfei Ruan, Li Tong, Ying Zhang, Yi Xiang, and Xiaocong Tian deploy a large database garnered from two Chinese corporate communications platforms to analyze how firms navigate the tension between the substantiveness of the disclosed information and the proprietary risk of damaging their own strategic pursuits. The authors categorize the factors moderating the relationship between strategy uniqueness and communication substantiveness and model the dependencies. The results partly challenge the received wisdom of the general positive relationship between reducing information asymmetry and the cost of capitalization.
Livestreaming retail is the increasingly important components of ecommerce, with livestream channels emerging on the major online selling platforms and on the online media taking on retailing functions. Over video, the sellers are able to interact with the users (potential buyers) in real time, thus attaining some of the features of social commerce. Along with conducting the sales, the livestreamers conduct social solicitations, such as customer feedback. In the concluding paper of the issue, Danyang Song, Xi Chen, Zhiling Guo, and Ruijin Jin present their investigation of the effects of these interacting sales and engagement communications on the performance of livestreaming campaigns. The effects on the sales are accompanied by the effects on the size of the customer base, considered a proxy for social capital. It is good to see the engagements of researchers with the emerging formats of ecommerce.