Week 14_Kapoor and Adner (2012)_Xinyu
What Firms Make vs. What They Know: How Firms’ Production and Knowledge Boundaries Affect Competitive Advantage in the Face of Technological Change
This paper is an exploration of how the relationship between technological change and firm performance is affected by ways in which firms are organized. According to transaction cost theory, firms typically choose to vertically integrate (hierarchies) or not (markets), whereas knowledge-based view says that firms have the option to integrate knowledge even they don’t want to integrate labor (vertical integration). Draw on these notions, this paper proposes that, when facing technological change, 1) vertically integrated firms generally perform better and have greater competitive advantage than non-integrated firms; 2) the type of technological changes (component change vs architectural change) moderates the advantage firms gain from vertical integration; and 3) among non-integrated firms, those with knowledge integration generally do better than those without knowledge integration.
The research is conducted in the context of global dynamic random access memory (RAM) industry. Firms’ performance as the dependent variable is measured by the time needed to launch product with new technology to the market (time-to-market). Key independent variables include a dummy to indicate vertical integration or not, knowledge of externally produced components (patent-based measurement), and a dummy to indicate the type of technological changes. The paper adopts an accelerated failure time (AFT) model, which is one kind of survival analysis assuming that the effect of a covariate is to accelerate or decelerate the life course of a process by some constant.
The empirical findings show that vertical integration increases time-to-market performance, moderating by the type of technological changes, and knowledge integration also increases time-to-market performance. However, the results reveal an interesting fact that knowledge integrated firms with partial vertical integration benefit less than their counterparts with no vertical integration at all.
Week 14 Angst et al _Yiran
Social contagion theory suggests that when performance is uncertainty, decision makers will imitate others within their ecosystem. Such contagion occurs either through the direct transmission of information during interactions between adopters and nonadopters, or via an observational process where managers scrutinize their environment and attend to the adoption decisions of other organizations. Based on social contagion theory, the author hypothesized a hospital’s likelihood of adopting EMRs as a function of its susceptibility to the influence of prior adopters, its proximity to prior adopters, and the infectiousness or potency of influence exerted by adopting hospitals.
They apply a heterogeneous diffusion model (HBM) technique to perform a temporal analysis of the dynamic contagion process, using archival data from a sample drawn from an annual survey spanning 1975 to 2005 of almost 4,000 U.S. hospitals. 7 out of 9 hypotheses are supported, suggesting that with respect to susceptibility to influence, greater hospital size and age are positively related to the likelihood of adoption for nonadopters. Also, the adoption of EMRs by young and large or old and small hospitals exerts almost no infectious influence on potential adopters, whereas adoption by large, old hospitals is the most contagious. A hospital’s “celebrity” status also contributes to its infectiousness. Furthermore, they also find strong effects for social proximity on a hospital’s likelihood of adoption, and regional effects for spatial proximity. In contrast to a view that size and age are impediments in innovation because they create apathy in organizations, maturity provides more opportunities for learning from others. This study yields important insights into what factors increase the likelihood of adoption of EMRs, which will benefit both practitioners and researchers.
Week14_Greenwood, G. and Wattal, S. (2016) _Ada
Show Me the Way To Go Home
: An Empirical Investigation of Ride Sharing and Alcohol Related Motor Vehicle Homicide
Preliminary analysis conducted by Uber and several industry analysts suggest that introduction of Uber and other ride sharing services has a negative influence on DUI arrests. However, these studies have been questioned on several grounds: including involvement of Uber in the data analysis, methodological rigor (i.e. single city estimations), and the presence of confounding factors such as changes in city’s population, bar scene, and tougher enforcement. In this work, they investigate how the entry of the driving service Uber influences the rate of alcohol related motor vehicle homicides. Using a difference in difference approach to exploit a natural experiment, the entry of Uber into markets in California between 2009 and 2013, findings suggest that the entrance of Uber X results in a 3.6% – 5.6% decrease in the rate of motor vehicle homicides per quarter in the state of California. These results extant understanding of the sharing economy.
Week 14_Ramasubbu, Bharadwaj, and Tayi (2015)_Yaeeun Kim
Normally, novelty and flexibility is perceived valuable due to its predicted positive influence on outcome. This article pinpointed the area of software process and reported the drivers, which can increase software process diversity. The software process is varied in plan-based and agile-process approaches at the firm. First, the authors conceptualized the degree of fit (or match) between a projects’ software process diversity and the level of process compliance by conducting focus group meetings and interviews. Next, in the second stage, they tested using empirical data from 410 large commercial software projects of a multinational firm.
The findings suggest that higher level of requirements volatility, design and technological novelty, and customer involvement increase software process diversity within a project. As expected, on the other hand, software process diversity decreased relative to increase in the level of process compliance to the firm’s process standards, enforced on the project. The attributes to increase diversity is reversely correlated with the level of process compliance. Overall, a higher degree of fit between the process diversity and process compliance of a project, which are largely associated with each other, are again correlated with a high level of project performance, based on project productivity and software quality. Boundary effect was found. The results was significant only when there is an increase in organizational process compliance efforts.
For the managerial implication, it is highly recommended to the project designers to suggest an appropriate fit between process diversity and process compliance for improving software project performance. The novel part of this study compared to the previous literature is the authors differentiate the level of process maturity organizations and the conflicting effect of process diversity and compliance efforts. In my opinion, weighing the fit between process diversity and process compliance is highly dependent on the project organizations.
The variety dimension of diversity was measured using the Blau’s index. Process compliance, team size, and team experience were in a reversely related to the effect on process diversity.
Week 13_Devaraj and Kohli (2003)_Vicky Xu
Performance Impacts of Information Technology: Is Actual Usage the Missing Link?
In the last decade, many studies focused on the relationship between investment in information technology (IT) and its effect on organizational performance continues to interest academics and practitioners. Devaraj and Kohli (2003) assess the impact of the use of IT on organizational performance. The context of this study is the use of healthcare system to hospitals. The following figure shows the research model within the context of a hospital network of this study (Figure 1. p. 277):
Devaraj and Kohli (2003) collected the panel data across 8 hospitals of a health system network over 36 monthly time periods. The implemented technology is decision support systems (DSS) that help hospitals to identify clinical and financial, and quality improving opportunities. The usage of technology was captured from “a log created by a utility program to track user resource consumption (p. 278).”
Devaraj and Kohli (2003) use time-series analyses with fixed effects to estimate the proposed models. To check reverse causality, the authors performed the Granger Causality Test. The authors further conducted omitted variable test to address the omitted variable issue.
The following table summarizes the results of the study:
The results of this study provide general support for the proposition that the greater the actual usage of technology, the better the financial and quality performance of hospitals. Implications in this study include: (1). There is evidence that investments in technologies have positive payoffs when actual usage of the technology is considered. (2). This study presents evidence for the monetary impact and temporal impact due to the use of technology. (3). The IT payoff literature has documented mixed findings on the impact of IT investment on performance.
Week13_Goh, Gao and Agarwal (2016)_Aaron
The creation of social value: can an online health community reduce rural-urban health disparities?
Goh, Gao and Agarwal (2016) investigated the creation of social value in online health communities. The authors proposed that online health communities provide a forum that transcends geographic constraints, representing a supportive social networking resource to mitigate health disparities.
Adapting the framework of health capability (Ruger 2010), the authors theorized how disadvantages caused by location lead to health capability’s gaps, and create health disparity outcomes. They argued that online health communities attenuates such a process by exchanging social support from urban to rural members.
Using a unique data set from a rare disease community, they conducted quantitative analysis by exponential random graph models to discover patterns of social support exchanged between users and the variations in these patterns based on users’ location. They found that, urban users are net suppliers of social support while rural participants are net recipients. Their finding advances extant understanding of value creation in online collectives, and yields implications for policy.
Week 13_Venkatesh et al (2016)_Xue Guo
Managing Citizens’ Uncertainty in E-Government Services: The Mediating and Moderating Roles of Transparency and Trust
Venkatesh et al (2016) proposes an integrated technology adoption model in the context of citizens’ adoption and use of e-government services. This paper is driven by the underutilization of e-government services, which prevent the e-government to achieve its full potential. This paper introduces the concept of uncertainty reduction and investigate the effects of citizen’s uncertainty on the use of e-government services.
There are three parts of the research mode of this paper. First, two main factors—information quality (accuracy and completeness) and channel characteristics (convenience and personalization), drive the intention uses of e-government services. Then the model proposes two means of uncertainty reduction—transparency and trust, can partially mediate and moderate the effects of information quality and channel on intention to use. At last, the model examines the effects of intention on the actual use and satisfaction.
Empirically, the paper collects 4430 data from citizen’s attitude towards the use of government websites and online appointment booking services in Hong Kong. The paper conducts hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses. First, the results shown that accuracy, completeness and convenience are positive determinants of citizens’ intentions to use both services. Then the paper tests the mediating role of transparency and trust and finds that completeness and personalization were fully mediated through transparency and trust. The model also includes the interaction terms and find significant moderating effects of transparency and trust.
One of this paper’s contributions is that it draws from multiple streams of research to identify factors that may affect citizens’ use of e-government services. It investigates the mediating and moderating role of transparency and trust, which has not been studied before.
Week 13_Ganco (2013)_Jung Kwan Kim
Ganco (2013) examines the relationship between knowledge complexity and employee mobility/entrepreneurship. The author argues that the knowledge gained in a prior firm significantly affects the choice of an inventor on the next move between staying, moving, and starting-up. More specifically, the complexity of knowledge works as a contingent factor to determine the modes of the next move in terms of mobility vs. entrepreneurship and individual vs. team mobility.
The empirical findings are just as intuitively expected. The inventors with highly complex knowledge are less likely to move to competing firms possibly because complexity inhibits knowledge diffusion. Furthermore, the inventors with highly complex knowledge in prior firms are more likely to start their ventures than to move to rivals. This is probably because transferring complex knowledge across the boundary of a firm is challenging while starting from a clean sheet can be more effective and efficient to appropriate the value of knowledge. In addition, highly complex knowledge tends to strengthen the tendency of co-inventors to move or start up as a team because a partial knowledge of an individual may not be enough to leverage the knowledge in a new setting.
All in all, this study carves out an interesting contingent factor in employee mobility and entrepreneurship, which can be generalizable in many knowledge-intensive industries.
Week 13 class – THURSDAY, April 14 at 9:30am at Speakman 200
Next week, we will meet on THURSDAY, April 14 at 9:30am at Speakman 200 (the usual classroom).
Week 12 Slage et al. 2015 Yiran
Understanding the triggers of senior managers’ IS investment decisions is important for both IS scholarship and IS practice. In this paper, the authors integrate insights from the behavioral theory of the firm and neoinstitutional theory to better understand how hospital senior managers make decisions about how and how much to invest in IS. Building on the understanding of IS investments as a form of organizational search, they argue that at least four recurring search mechanisms (i.e. problemitics search, institutionalized search, mimetic search and slack search) will influence the decision of the amount of resources allocated to IS.
Problemistic search is defined as search that is stimulated by a problem and is directed toward finding a solution to that problem. Slack search refers to a process that when resources are viewed as being in surplus, senior managers will seek to identify promising investment opportunities. Institutionalized search is commonly known as search conducted by organizations, which tends to be orderly, standardized, and somewhat independent of success or failure. Mimetic search can be conceived as a “search for information about what organizational characteristics are legitimated in their environmental niche. The first two search mechanism can be explained as behavioral search mechanism, while the last two are supported by neoinstitutional theory.
They draw on panel data from all 153 nonspecialist public hospital organizations in England. Findings from our dynamic panel data analyses suggest that hospital managers’ IS investment decisions are driven not only by the desire to improve organizational performance (problemistic search), but also by the need to achieve continuity in resource allocation (institutionalized search) and to signal compliance with external norms and expectations (mimetic search). The objective of making adequate use of uncommitted resources (slack search), however, was found to be salient as a trigger of IS investments only among hospital organizations with low regulative legitimacy.
Week 12_Miller and Tucker (2009)_Yaeeun Kim
The study tests how privacy protection affects the diffusion of electronic medical records based on the understanding of the network effect. There is empirical study of the role of network externalities in electronic banking adoption by banks. However, this study is the first to address how network effects and technology adoption decisions are affected by privacy protection. According to the conceptual model of hospital EMR adoption, when net gain from electronic records, defined relative to the alternative technology of paper records, is positive, a hospital will adopt EMRs.
As expected, state privacy protection of hospital medical information inhibits EMR adoption or the network effects of EMR, which is defined as positive externalities experienced by individual hospitals who adopt EMRs when other local hospitals have adopted electronic records. The finding shows that without hospital privacy protection, one hospital’s adoption increase the propensity of other hospitals in the local area to adopt by 7%, but with the privacy protection, no network effects are indicated. This study contributes in quantifying how a hospital’s decision to adopt EMRs is affected by whether state privacy protection restricts a hospital’s ability to disclose information.
The authors suggest for the future study to include the overall welfare effects of either EMRs or privacy laws, which is inferred from a trade-off between privacy protection and EMRs. For the further study, it is demanded to investigate the extent to which privacy protection can be optimized to minimize disruption to the diffusion and use of interdependent technology. I also agree that the positive spillovers from increase of security from protecting confidentiality and evaluations toward the effect of strategy toward adopting EMRs would increase the speed of diffusion.
Week 12_Bhargava and Mishra (2014)_Vicky Xu
Electronic Medical Records and Physician Productivity: Evidence from Panel Data Analysis
Bhargava and Mishra (2014) examined the impacts of electronic medical record (EMR) system implementation on physician productivity across different specialties and to uncover the dynamic and temporal nature of these impacts. The conceptual foundations of this study draw upon research from three strands of work: physician productivity, IT-enabled productivity, and task-technology fit (TTF). And Bargava and Mishra (2014) tried to fill the gap in the literature by examining two research questions: (1) How does physician productivity change over time as a result of EMR implementation? (2) Does this impact differ for physicians of different specialties?
Bhargave and Mishra (2014) collected pre and post-implementation productivity data on 87 primary care physicians (PCPs) over a 39-month period, yielding 3,186 physician (Internal medicine specialists (IMs), pediatricians (Peds), and family practitioners (FPs))-month observations at an academic medical center associated with a large public university in the western U.S. Also qualitative interview data and survey data were collected to obtain insights into the context of EMR use at this study.
Bhargave and Mishra (2014) found that: First, the net impact of EMR is more benign on IMs than on Peds and FPs. Second, physician experience is not significantly related to productivity. Third, FPs and Peds experience a decrease in productivity compared to IMs in the learning phase.
The main contributions in the study: (1) Extends the research in both health informatics and IT productivity literatures. (2) Provides informed indications that the nature, direction, and magnitude of impacts induced by technological innovations. (3) Provides a rigorously derived dynamic pattern for describing the productivity impact of EMRs over time. (4) Demonstrates divergence in EMR impact across specialties, require further investigation and are of consequence to both health IT vendors and users.
Week12_Salge et al. (2015)_Xinyu
Investing in Information Systems: On the Behavioral and Institutional Search Mechanisms Underpinning Hospitals’ IS Investment Decisions
While most of the literature on IS investment is focusing on the adoption and the value of IS investments, little literature inquiries the determinants of those investments. To this end, this paper conceptualizes senior managers’ decisions on IS investments in hospitals as four search mechanisms that jointly determine IS investment intensity of an organization.
Based on the behavioral theory of the firm (for the first two mechanisms) and the institutional theory (for the last two mechanisms), the four search mechanisms proposed are problemistic search, slack search, institutionalized search, and mimetic search, as described below. Problemistic search occurs when senior managers realize that there are problems to be solved, and is measured by the difference between hospitals’ current performance and expected performance. Slack search is motivated by financial surplus, which arises excess capital resource that allows managers to make investments; this is captured by the liquidity of hospitals’ financial performance. Institutionalized search is routine-based, temporally stable investments which is measured by the one-year lagged IS investment intensity of the organization. Finally, mimetic search is the imitation of the investment done by peer organizations, and is captured by the IS investment intensity of a reference group.
The paper empirically proves that problemistic search, institutional search and mimetic search are three mechanisms that directly lead to IS investment. It also proposes a moderating role of regulative legitimacy, and shows that slack search, institutional search and mimetic search indirectly determine IS investment, through the moderation of regulative legitimacy.
Week12_Menon and Kohli (2013)_Ada
Blunting Damocles’ Sword: A Longitudinal Model of Healthcare IT Impact on Malpractice Insurance Premium and Quality of Patient Care
Motivation:
Prior studies on the business value of information technology (IT) mainly focus on the impact of IT investments
on productivity and firm profitability. Few have considered its implication on expected and actual
product or service quality. This paper fills this gap.
Research Question:
This study investigates the impact of past healthcare IT (HIT) expenditure on the malpractice insurance premium (MIP) and the moderating effect of past HIT expenditure on the relationship bet theyen past MIP and current quality of patient care.
Conclusion:
By examining hospitals’ IT spending and performance, they found evidence of a direct impact of HIT on MIP as well as on the quality of patient care. The evidence of lower readmissions and mortalities in association with past HIT expenditure validates Hypothesis H1 regarding the direction of impact of HIT on quality of patient care. The hypothesis was supported by the argument that IT is able to provide appropriate alerts during patient care. Readily available patient information facilitates good quality medical care, and coordination between staff members administering medical care is facilitated by HIT, leading to fewer errors in patient care. Although this result is consistent with conclusions in prior studies, the significance of the coefficients of past MIP in both models of patient care quality indicates that prior research had not satisfactorily accounted for ex ante risk. Thus, Hypothesis H3 contributes to healthcare literature by providing an explanation for the inconsistency among the findings of prior research.
Week 12_Bhargava and Mishra (2014)_Aaron
Electronic Medical Records and Physician Productivity: Evidence from Panel Data Analysis
Bhargava and Mishra (2014) investigated the impact of an electronic medical record (EMR) system on the productivity of physicians. This study is of interest and significant for the following reasons: 1) there is ambiguous evidence on whether and how EMRs could facilitated efficient workflows for physicians, causing practically concerns but receiving little academic attentions. 2) The EMRs’ impact on physician productivity is also related to whether or not the technology fulfills its potential to curtail the rise in healthcare expenditures in U.S.
Drawing on prior literature on physician productivity, IT productivity and task-technology fit theory, the authors examined how two types of EMRs use (information review and information enter) could affect physician productivity, and how those effects are different in specialties (internal medicine specialists (IMs), pediatricians (Peds), and family practitioners (FPs)) across implementation process (pre-entry, learning and stable phases).
They used a panel data set comprising 87 physicians with different specialties in 12 primary care clinics of an academic healthcare system in the western U.S. They employed the Arellano-Bond system GMM estimation technique on their data set with 3186 physician-month productivity observations over 39 months. They found that productivity drops sharply after EMRs implementation and recovers partly over the next few months. The longer-term impact depends on physician specialty. And the impact of EMRs is more benign on IMs than on Peds and FPs.
They postured that the fit provided by an EMR system to the task requirements of physicians of various specialties may be key to disentangling the productivity dynamics. Their finding revealed that, on one hand, EMR systems do not produce immediate productivity gain that could lead to substantial savings in healthcare; at the same time, EMRs do not cause a major productivity loss on a sustained basis, as many physicians fear.
Week 12_Chan and Ghose (2014)_Jung Kwan Kim
Chan and Ghose (2014) tenaciously examine one phenomenon: the positive impact of Craigslist’s entry on the increase in HIV incidence. The authors theoretically explain the phenomenon with a few underlying mechanisms. First, people tend to prefer an instant satisfaction to a delayed reward, a choice that an online intermediary can easily support. Second, an online intermediary can provide the means to lower the cost of information seeking and to find a broader (potential) audience who may not be available otherwise.
Based on the natural experiment to identify the entry effect of Craigslist in the period from 1999 to 2008, the authors find that the entry does lead to more cases of HIV. This simple-but-powerful finding is supported through various control variables, robustness checks, and falsification tests. As for control variables, the empirical analysis includes demographic features, socioeconomic indicators, and the Internet availability along with alternative models to accommodate fixed effects of states and years. More importantly, the empirical test is compared with other sample data of non-physical contact diseases to catch a spurious effect. An alternative test also addresses the possibility of (if any) pre-entry effect. In order to secure exogeneity of Craigslist entry, hierarchical duration models are employed to see whether the control variables in the main model can predict the entry. The presence of HIV incidence is included to check the reverse causality. Throughout all the models, the entry of Craigslist is consistently significant and positive to the increase of HIV incidence.
All in all, the authors evidently support a substantial economic impact of an information intermediary on issues such as outbreak of diseases and surge of healthcare costs.
Week 12_Menon and Kohli (2013)_Xue Guo
Blunting Damocles’ Sword: A Longitudinal Model of Healthcare IT Impact on Malpractice Insurance Premium and Quality of Patient Care
Menon and Kohli (2013) examine the impact of IT investments on actual product or service quality. Specifically, this paper studies the relationship between the past healthcare IT (HIT) expenditure and the malpractice insurance premium (MIP). It mainly wants to investigate two problems (1) whether past HIT expenditures affects MIP and the quality of patient care and (2) whether this expenditure moderates the relationship between past MIP and the quality of patient care.
The authors propose that HIT can incur lower MIP and improve the patient care quality because it can efficiently monitor, control, and reduce information asymmetry between the hospital and insurer. Also, HIT’s recordkeeping and monitoring capabilities induce employees and physicians to align their behaviors with service delivery prescribed, which result in higher quality.
Empirically, the paper develops a longitudinal model including a panel data set for 66 general medical and surgical hospitals. It uses readmission and mortality rate as the proxy of the quality of patient care and adopts the depreciation expenses across information processing units as the measure of HIT. The regression model uses the random effects to rule out the impact of hospital-specific and time-specific factors. In addition, the model uses lags of dependent variables as instruments to account for the endogeneity of the independent variables.
The paper found that past HIT expenditures improve the quality of patient care and that it is negatively associated with current MIP. They also found a negative moderating effect of past HIT expenditures on the link between past MIP and current service quality. This paper contributes to the business value of IT by conceptualizing the impact of HIT on ex-ante risk as an expectation and future operations.
Week 14 – paper assignment
Angst, C.M., Agarwal, R., Sambamurthy, V., and Kelly, K. (2010) “Social Contagion and Information Technology Diffusion: The Adoption of Electronic Medical Records in U.S. Hospitals,” Information Systems Research (56:8) pp. 1219-1241. (selected by Yiran)
Kapoor, R. and Adner, R. (2012) “What Firms Make vs. What They Know: How Firms’ Production and Knowledge Boundaries Affect Competitive Advantage in the Face of Technological Change,” Organization Science (23:5) pp. 1227-1248. (selected by Xinyu)
Ramasubbu, N., Bharadwaj, A., and Tayi, G.K. (2015) “Software Process Diversity: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Analysis of Impact on Project Performance,” MIS Quarterly (39:4) pp. 787-807. (selected by Yae Eun)
Greenwood, G. and Wattal, S. (2016) “Show Me the Way to Go Home: An Empirical Investigation of Ride Sharing and Alcohol Related Motor Vehicle Homicide,” MIS Quarterly, forthcoming. (selected by Ada)
Week 13 – paper assignment
Devaraj, S. and Kohli, R. (2003) “Performance Impacts of Information Technology: Is Actual Usage the Missing Like?,” Management Science (49:3) pp. 273-289. (selected by Vicky)
Ganco, M (2013) “Cutting the Gordian Knot: The Effect of Knowledge Complexity on Employee Mobility and Entrepreneurship,” Strategic Management Journal (34:6) pp. 666-686. (selected by JK)
Goh, J.M., Gao, G.G., and Agarwal, R. (2016) “The Creation of Social Value: Can an Online Health Community Reduce Rural-Urban Health Disparities?,” MIS Quarterly (40:1) pp. 247-263. (selected by Aaron)
Venkatesh, V., Thong, J.Y.L., Chan, F.K.Y., and Hu, P.J.H. (2016) “Managing Citizens’ Uncertainty in E-Government Services:The Mediating and Moderating Roles of Transparency and Trust,” Information Systems Research (27:1) pp. 87-111. (selected by Xue)
Week 12 – Healthcare – paper assignment
| Miller and Tucker (2009) | Yae Eun |
| Menon and Kohli (2013) | Ada |
| Menon and Kohli (2013) | Xue |
| Chan and Ghose (2014) | JK |
| Bhargava and Mishra (2014) | Vicky |
| Bhargava and Mishra (2014) | Aaron |
| Salge et al. (2015) | Yiran |
| Salge et al. (2015) | Xinyu |
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