Brad Greenwood

Sanjeev Dewan
Professor of Information Systems
Paul Merage School of Business
University of California, Irvine

Friday, April 24, 2015

10:00am – 11:30am Speakman Hall 200
Seminar Title: Popularity or Proximity: Characterizing the Nature of Social Influence in an Online Music Community

Abstract

We study social influence in an online music community. In this community users can listen to and “favorite” (or like) songs, and follow the favoriting behavior of their social network friends — and the community as a whole. From an individual user’s perspective, two types of peer consumption information are salient for each song: total number of favorites by the community as a whole, and favoriting behavior by their social network friends. Correspondingly, we study two types of social influence: popularity influence, driven by the total number of favorites from the community as a whole, and proximity influence, due to the favoriting behavior of immediate social network friends. Our quasi-experimental research design applies a variety of empirical methods to highly granular music consumption data from an online music community. Our analysis finds robust evidence of both popularity and proximity influence. Further, popularity influence is more important for narrow-appeal music as compared to broad-appeal music. Finally, the two types of influence are substitutes for one another, so that proximity influence, when available, dominates the effect of popularity influence. These findings have implications for design and marketing strategies for online communities, such as the one studied in this paper.

Yuqing Ren
Assistant Professor
Carlson School of Management
University of Minnesota

Friday, March 27, 2015

10:00am – 11:30am Speakman Hall 200
Seminar Title: Understanding Word-of-Mouth and Customer Engagement on Facebook Business Pages

Abstract

TBA

Hüseyin Tanriverdi
Associate Professor
McCombs School of Business
University of Texas at Austin

Friday, March 20, 2015

10:00am – 11:30am Speakman Hall 200
Seminar Title: THE IMPACTS OF HIERARCHY VERSUS DIGITAL PLATFORM ON KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND APPROPRIATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR FIRMS AND EMPLOYEES

Abstract

This presentation will focus on a major challenge faced by knowledge-intensive firms and knowledge workers: how to create new knowledge and also appropriate profits from it. Firms and their knowledge workers often battle over who owns employee-created knowledge and who is entitled to profit from it even when employment contracts clearly state that the firm is the legal owner of all employee-created knowledge. The presentation will cover cumulative findings from a program of research on the causes, consequences, and potential mitigation mechanisms of knowledge ownership disputes between firms and their knowledge workers. The findings indicate that strategies used by hierarchical mode of governance foster either the knowledge creation objective of the firm or the knowledge appropriation objective, but not both simultaneously. They also indicate that the emerging, digitally-enabled platform mode of governance could address the knowledge creation / appropriation dilemma of firms better than the hierarchy. The presentation will also address this dilemma from the perspective of knowledge workers. It will present a recent study comparing knowledge creation and appropriation behaviors of two groups of mobile app develops: one group works as salaried employees of software firms while the other group works as independent software developers who develop mobile apps for digital platforms in return for a share of sales or ad revenues. Preliminary findings indicate that, relative to hierarchy, digital platform better motivates knowledge workers to create new knowledge. But digital platform also increases knowledge workers’ territoriality over knowledge, and increases legal disputes over knowledge ownership and profit sharing arrangements of the platform. Collectively, the findings imply that while the emerging digital platform mode of governance could address the knowledge creation / appropriation dilemma of firms better than the hierarchy, it creates more challenges for knowledge workers who see digital platforms as an alternative work form for making a living.

Rick Watson
J. Rex Fuqua Distinguished Chair for Internet Strategy
Department of Management Information Systems
University of Georgia

Friday, February 20, 2015

10:00am – 11:30am Speakman Hall 200
Seminar Title: The Weakness of Strong Ties

Abstract

Sam Ransbotham
Associate Professor
Carroll School of Management
Boston College

Friday, January 30, 2015

10:00am – 11:30am Speakman Hall 200
Seminar Title: An Empirical Analysis of Exploitation Attempts based on Vulnerabilities in Open Source Software

Abstract

TBA

Min-Seok Pang
Assistant Professor, Management Information Systems
Temple University

Friday, Nov 21, 2014

10:00am – 11:30am Speakman Hall 200
Seminar Title: IT Is All About Politics – Information Technology Investments in the U.S. Federal Government in 2003-2015

Abstract

Does politics matter to information technology (IT) investments in the U.S. federal government? This study investigates how the national politics affects IT investment profiles in U.S. federal agencies. Drawing upon various theories from the political sciences and information systems (IS) literature, we hypothesize that a federal agency makes more capacity-building IT investments and spend less in IT maintenance (i) when it performs homogeneous functions, (ii) when its head is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, (iii) when the Congress is controlled by the President’s ruling party, and (iv) when the agency is neither too conservative nor too liberal. We also propose that the impact of agency ideology on IT investment profiles strengthens when the Congress is controlled by the opposition party. With a panel dataset from 133 federal agencies and bureaus in 2003-2015, our empirical analyses support all of our hypotheses and produce several intriguing findings. For instance, when both the Senate and the House of Representatives are controlled by the ruling party, federal agencies are predicted to invest approximately $5%-point more in new IT development and modernization than when the opposition party holds the majority in both chambers. We contribute to the IS literature in two fronts. We study IT investments profiles in the U.S. federal government, which consumes more than $75 billion of tax revenues for IT annually yet has received scant attention by IS researchers. We also examine what affects budget allocation decisions between IT development and maintenance, which to the best of our knowledge, few IS studies have studied so far.

Marius Niculescu
Assistant Professor, Department of Information Technology
Georgia Tech

Friday, November 14, 2014

10:00am – 11:30am Speakman Hall 200
Seminar Title: Cloud Implications on Software Network Structure and Security Risks

Abstract

By software vendors offering, via the cloud, software-as-a-service (SaaS) versions of traditionally on-premises application software, security risks associated with usage become more diversified. This can greatly increase the value associated with the software. In an environment where negative security externalities are present and users make complex consumption and patching decisions, we construct a model that clarifies whether and how SaaS versions should be offered by vendors. We find that the existence of version-specific security externalities is sufficient to warrant a versioned outcome, which has been shown to be suboptimal in the absence of security risks. In high security-loss environments, we find that SaaS should be geared to the middle tier of the consumer market if patching costs and the quality of the SaaS offering are high, and geared to the lower tier otherwise. In the former case, when security risk associated with each version is endogenously determined by consumption choices, strategic interactions between the vendor and consumers may cause a higher tier consumer segment to prefer a lower inherent quality product. Relative to on-premises benchmarks, we find that software diversification leads to lower average security losses for users when patching costs are high. However, when patching costs are low, surprisingly, average security losses can increase as a result of SaaS offerings and lead to lower consumer surplus. We also investigate the vendor’s security investment decision and establish that, as the market becomes riskier, the vendor tends to increase investments in an on-premises version and decrease investments in a SaaS version. On the other hand, in low security-loss environments, we find that SaaS is optimally targeted to a lower tier of the consumer market, average security losses decrease, and consumer surplus increases as a result. Security investments increase for both software versions as risk increases in these environments.

Ram Chellappa
Associate Professor, Information Systems & Operations Management
Emory University

Friday, October 31, 2014

10:00am – 11:30am Speakman Hall 318
Seminar Title: On the Temporal Nature of Sales to Rank Relationships of Digital Music

Abstract 

A significant amount of work in IS, economics and marketing has used the relationship suggested by Chevalier and Goolsbee (2003) to impute demand from the relative sales-rank of a product in its category. However many industries, in particular the music industry are subject to temporal changes suggesting that the sales to rank relationship may not be fixed. Analyses of weekly album sales data not only reveals statistically different sales distribution week-to-week, but also significant differences in this relationship. To account for this difference, our research incorporates two temporal factors, namely size of the competition and market. We further plan to contrast physical and digital ranks and sales of albums to examine any distinct differences in consumption patterns.

Prior research suggests that the relationship between sales of a book and its category rank is a power-law distribution, more specifically a Pareto distribution. A number of papers in IS have used this relationship for the online book industry (specifically Amazon.com) to be of the form: R =α Sθ . While this relationship may very well hold for the book industry, the music industry is undergoing great changes with digitization. A number of elements are unique to this industry: First, weekly distribution of sales is quite different from each other and over the years increasingly fewer titles are accounting for a greater percentage of sales. Second, album sales largely exhibit a distinct exponential decay sales pattern beginning with their week of release and thirdly, there are significant seasonality issues wherein competition (as measured by number of new titles) is most severe in the 4th quarter. Our research is focused on specifically examining the temporal variation in the shape parameter θ .