MIS Distinguished Speaker Series

Temple University

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Sunil Wattal

March 8: Bruce Weber to present on Launching Successful E-Markets: A Broker-Level Order Routing Analysis of Two Options Exchanges

By

Bruce Weber
Dean, Lerner College of Business & Economics
University of Delware

March 8, 2013

Speakman Hall 200, 10:15am – 1145am
Seminar Title: Launching Successful E-Markets: A Broker-Level Order Routing Analysis of Two Options Exchanges

Abstract

New e-markets try in a number of ways to attract a critical mass of participation and usage. Two innovative, all-electronic options exchanges, the International Securities Exchange (ISE) and the Boston Options Exchange (BOX), opened for trading in 2000 and 2004. In contrast to rival floor markets, they offered immediate order execution, direct user access, and reduced costs. ISE and BOX grew trading volumes and won market share from four incumbent exchanges in the U.S. We observe significant differences between broker order routing practices across ISE and BOX leading to the markets’ different growth patterns. We develop and test hypotheses about new market growth using a panel of six years of quarterly disclosures from 24 major brokerage firms. We find that membership affiliations are the dominate force in predicting brokers’ order routing patterns. In contrast to prior research, network externalities, as measured by an exchange’s previous quarter market share, are not significant predictors after controlling for temporal heterogeneity. Managerial implications are discussed.

Please click here for a copy of the paper

March 1: Paulo Goes to present on “Popularity Effect” in User-Generated Contents: Evidence from Online Product Reviews

By

Paulo Goes
Professor and Chair, MIS
University of Arizona

March 1, 2013
Speakman Hall 200, 11:15am – 1245am
Seminar Title :  “Popularity Effect” in User-Generated Contents: Evidence from Online Product Reviews

Abstract
Online product reviews are increasingly important for consumer decisions, yet we still know little about how reviews are generated in the first place. In an effort to gather more reviews, many websites encourage user interactions such as allowing one user to subscribe to another. Do these interactions actually facilitate the generation of product reviews, and more important, what kind of reviews do such interactions induce? We study these questions using data from epinions.com, one of the largest product review websites where users can subscribe to one another. By applying both panel data and flexible matching methods, we find that as users become more popular, they produce more reviews and more objective reviews; however, their numeric ratings systematically change, and become more negative and more varied. Such tradeoff has not been previously documented, and has important implications for not just product review websites, but user-generated content sites as well.

Please click here for a copy of the paper

Feb 22: Munir Mandviwalla to present on Moving From Access to Use of the Information Infrastructure: A Multi-level Socio-Technical Framework

By

Munir Mandviwalla
Associate Professor and Chair, MIS
Fox School of Business, Temple University

February 22, 2013
Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1100am
Seminar Title : Moving From Access to Use of the Information Infrastructure: A Multi-level Socio-Technical Framework

Abstract
‘Universal access’ (UA) to the Internet and the associated information infrastructure has become an important economic and societal goal. However, UA initiatives tend to focus on issues such as physical access and geographical ubiquity, and measure adoption through penetration rates. In this paper, we apply an interpretive case study approach to analyze the Philadelphia wireless broadband initiative to provide insights into the nature of UA and extend this concept to also consider Universal Use (UU). UU is important because simply providing access does not guarantee use. UU is presented as a conceptual goal that starts with the challenge of physical access but which necessarily also leads to considerations of use. The results show that the human and technological elements underlying individual access and use are deeply embedded within various institutional elements and collectives that enable but also constrain meaningful use. We integrate our findings into a multi-level framework that shows how access and use are influenced by both micro and macro factors. The framework includes individual and collective constructs such as performance, interoperability, affordability, resource mobilization, access, community involvement, availability, and interconnectedness to propose UU as a vision, concept, and measurable construct. The work provides new insights into the study of the information infrastructure, digital divide, and public policy.

Please click here for a copy of the paper

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Feb 8: Shawndra Hill to present on Talkographics: Using What Viewers Say Online to Calculate Audience Affinity Networks for Social TV-based Recommendations

By

Shawndra Hill
Assistant Professor, OIM Dept
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

February 8, 2013
Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1130am
Seminar Title : Talkographics: Using What Viewers Say Online to Calculate Audience Affinity Networks for Social TV-based Recommendations

Abstract
Viewers of TV shows are increasingly taking to online sites like Facebook and Twitter to comment about the shows they watch as well as to contribute content about their daily lives. We present a novel recommendation system (RS) based on the user-generated content (UGC) contributed by TV viewers via the social networking site Twitter. In our approach, a TV show is represented by all of the tweets of its viewers who follow the show on Twitter. These tweets, in aggregate, enable us to reliably calculate the affinity between TV shows and to describe how and why certain shows are similar in terms of their audiences in a privacy friendly way. This paper’s two main contributions are: 1) a new methodology for collecting data from social media — including information about product networks (or how shows are connected through users on a social network), geographic location, and user-contributed text comments — which can be used to generate affinity networks and test them; and 2) a new privacy friendly UGC-based RS that relies on all publicly-available text contributed by viewers, as opposed to only pre-selected keywords extracted from the UGC associated with the shows, a specific ontology or taxonomy, which makes our approach more flexible and generalizable than those used in any prior research. We show that our approach predicts remarkably well the TV shows that Twitter users follow. We also explain why the approach works so well: First, we show that the UGC reflects the demographics, geographic location, and psychographics of viewers, and coin the term talkographics to refer to descriptions of a TV show’s viewers — or in general any product’s audience — that are revealed by the words used in text messages sent by Twitter-using TV viewers; second, we show that Twitter text can represent many complex nuanced combinations of the demographic, geographic, and psychographic features of the audience; third, we show that we can use talkographic profiles to first calculate similarities between TV shows, then use these similarities reliably in RSs; we also show that our approach can be combined with a product association network approach to achieve even better recommendations; finally, we show that our text-based approach performs best for shows for which there is a demographic bias to the viewing audience compared to those that do not have a demographic bias. To demonstrate that our RS is generalizable, we apply the same approach to followers of clothing and automobile retailers.

 

Dec 7: Kartik Hosanagar to present on Will the Global Village Fracture into Tribes: Recommender Systems and their Effects on Consumers

By

Kartik Hosanagar
Associate Professor, OIM Dept
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

December 7, 2012
Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1130am
Seminar Title : Will the Global Village Fracture into Tribes: Recommender Systems and their Effects on Consumers

Abstract
Personalization is becoming ubiquitous on the World Wide Web. Such systems use statistical techniques to infer a customer’s preferences and recommend content best suited to him (e.g., “Customers who liked this also liked…”). A debate has emerged as to whether personalization has drawbacks. By making the web hyper-specific to our interests, does it fragment internet users, reducing shared experiences and narrowing media consumption? We study whether personalization is in fact fragmenting the online population. Surprisingly, it does not appear to do so in our study. Personalization appears to be a tool that helps users widen their interests, which in turn creates commonality with others. This increase in commonality occurs for two reasons, which we term volume and product mix effects. The volume effect is that consumers simply consume more after personalized recommendations, increasing the chance of having more items in common. The product mix effect is that, conditional on volume, consumers buy a more similar mix of products after recommendations.

Please click here for a copy of the paper

Nov 30: Steven Johnson to present on The strength of words online: Emergent leadership in online communities

By

Steven Johnson
Assistant Professor, MIS
Fox School of Business, Temple University

November 30, 2012
Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1100am
Seminar Title : The strength of words online: Emergent leadership in online communities

 Abstract
Compared to traditional organizations, online communities lack formal power or leadership positions. Instead, leadership in online communities is an emergent process resulting from influencing others. The objective of this paper is to investigate how network structure and language usage lead to influence in online communities. Communication online occurs almost exclusively through written words. The study of online influence has been dominated by a focus on structural network position with surprisingly little research addressing how the comparative use of language shapes community dynamics. Using participant surveys to identify influential members, this study analyzes a year of network history and message content to identify if leader utterances have unique qualities compared to the utterances of other core community members. Analysis supports the conclusion that online leadership derives from more than network position; it is also associated with distinctive written communication patterns. The composite view of emergent leaders in online communities is: they are in a central, core position in a network; they concentrate participation in fewer message threads than others; and, they provide a large number of positive, concise posts that include an above average number of external links and use simple language familiar to other participants. Online community leaders emerge through both the context and content of online communication.

Please email swattal@temple.edu for a copy of the paper

Oct 19: Paul Leonardi to speak on Using Social Technologies to Learn “Who Knows What” and “Who Knows Whom” in the Organization

By

Paul Leonardi
Pentair-Nugent Associate Professor
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

October 19, 2012
Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1130am
Seminar Title :  Using Social Technologies to Learn “Who Knows What” and “Who Knows Whom” in the Organization

Abstract
In most discussions of intra-organizational knowledge sharing, the words “search” and “transfer” are never far apart. Organizational theorists normally presume that before knowledge can be transferred, someone has to find where that knowledge resides through an active search process. I propose an alternative antecedent to knowledge transfer than search by developing the concept of ambient awareness. Through routine exposure to ambient communication – communications happening around us that we don’t partake in, but that we can eavesdrop upon – we begin to learn who knows what and who knows whom. By developing ambient awareness, we are ready, when the time comes to request a knowledge transfer to simply ask the right person for it or for access to it – we don’t first have to engage in lengthy procedures to search for it, nor do we have to maintain dual networks that support search and transfer simultaneously. I propose that the use of social media tools within organizations can overcome problems associated with the development of ambient awareness because they make messages transparent and networks visible. Through our exposure to these transparent messages and visible networks we develop an awareness of who knows whom and who knows what.

Oct 11: Hilal Atasoy to present on Firm-Level Evidence of the Effects of IT Use on Employment and Labor Wages

By

Hilal Atasoy
Assistant Professor,
Fox School of Business, Temple University

October 12, 2012
Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1100am
Seminar Title :  Firm-Level Evidence of the Effects of IT Use on Employment and Labor Wages

Abstract
This study analyzes the adoption and use of information technology (IT) by firms and their effects on employment and labor wages. Despite the prevalent role of IT in todays economy, the question on whether and how IT contributes to employment and wages has not been addressed in the IS literature. We use IT complementarities, skilled-biased technical change, and lagged-effects of IT theories to derive predictions on the effects of IT use on IT labor and on non-IT labor, respectively. We hypothesize that IT use has direct positive effect on IT labor, and an indirect positive effect on non-IT labor, e ffects that materialize through changes in net output and productivity (value-added per employee). We examine data from Turkey that include detailed information on IT infrastructure, IT applications, and software use, e-commerce and IT outsourcing. Using the generalized propensity score matching and instrumental variables methods to address concerns of endogeneity, our results show positive effects of IT on employment and wages at the rm level. This effect is largely due to an increase in IT jobs in the short-run, implying that IT use has direct immediate effects on IT employment. However, the effects on non-IT employment become significant only with lagged (one- and two-year) eff ects of IT use. This is because the effects of IT on non-IT employment take time to realize through increases in output and productivity. We also find similar lagged-effects of IT on output and productivity. Theoretical and practical implications on the effects of IT on employment and labor wages are discussed along with implications for public policy.

Click here for a copy of the paper

May 11: Radhika Santhanam to speak on Digital Games and Beyond: What Happens when Players Compete?

By

Radhika Santhanam

Gatton Endowed Research Professor

Decision Sciences and Information Systems Area

Gatton School of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky

 

May 11, 2012

Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1130am

Seminar Title : Digital Games and Beyond: What Happens when Players Compete?

 

Abstract

Because digital games are fun, engaging, and popular, organizations are attempting to integrate games within organizational activities as serious games, with the anticipation that it can improve employees’ motivation and performance. But in order to do so and obtain the intended outcomes, it is necessary to first obtain an understanding of how different digital game designs impact players’ behaviors and emotional responses. Hence, in this study, we address one key element of popular game designs, competition. Using extant research on tournaments and intrinsic motivation, we model competitive games as a skill-based tournament and conduct an experimental study to understand player behaviors and emotional responses under different competition conditions. When players compete with players of similar skill levels, they apply more effort as indicated by more games played and longer duration of play. But when players compete with players of lower skill levels, they report higher levels of enjoyment and lower levels of arousal after game-playing. We discuss the implications for organizations seeking to introduce games premised on competition and provide a framework to guide information system researchers to embark on a study of games.

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April 27: Gwanhoo Lee to speak on Balancing Rigor, Standardization, and Agility in Distributed IS Development: An Ambidexterity Perspective

By

Gwanhoo Lee

Associate Professor, ITM

Director of the Center for IT and the Global Economy

Kogod School of Business, American University

 

April 27, 2012

Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1130am

Seminar Title : Balancing Rigor, Standardization, and Agility in Distributed IS Development: An Ambidexterity Perspective

 

Abstract

Distributed information systems (IS) development faces daunting challenges including communication and coordination difficulties, increased user requirement uncertainty, and greater task complexity. To cope with such challenges, distributed IS teams attempt to build effective development process capabilities such as process rigor, process standardization, and process agility. However, the complex effects of these process capabilities on distributed IS development performance are not well understood or empirically validated. To fill this gap in our knowledge, we investigate how rigor, standardization, and agility of development process respectively affect the performance of the system delivered by a distributed team. Furthermore and more importantly, we investigate the notion of IS development process ambidexterity which is defined as the simultaneous presence of alignment and agility in development process, where rigor and standardization represent two dimensions of alignment. We examine if such process ambidexterity demonstrates a positive effect on system performance. We used hierarchical regression to analyze field data from project managers of distributed IS development. Our results support a positive main effect of rigor, standardization, and agility on system performance in distributed development. We find a positive interaction effect of rigor and agility, indicating a synergistic effect of process ambidexterity. Contrary to our expectation, however, we find a negative interaction effect of standardization and agility, indicating an offsetting effect of process ambidexterity. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for balancing rigor, standardization, and agility in distributed development in order to achieve better system performance.

Click here for a copy of the paper

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