MIS Distinguished Speaker Series

Temple University

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Dec 6 – Ning Nan to present “From Hidden Order to Hidden Solution: A Coevolutionary Perspective of Digital Competitive Moves”

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From Hidden Order to Hidden Solution: A Coevolutionary Perspective of Digital Competitive Moves

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Ning Nan

Associate Professor
Accounting and Information Systems Division
Sauder School of Business
The University of British Columbia

Friday, December 6

10:30 – 12:00 pm | Speakman 200

Abstact:

Technological advances and hypercompetition almost inevitably drive firms to attempt increasingly complex digital competitive moves (DCMs). Against this backdrop, this study answers a basic question; does DCM complexity add to competitive advantage? We applied the coevolutionary perspective to model DCM complexity as changes in subassemblies of components and links in a DCM. We tested the research model with empirical data on 485 digital competitive moves. We found that high-performing competitive moves leverage changes in digital technologies as their generative foundation while low-performing moves rely largely on traditional strategies such as price cuts. Further, when high-performing competitive moves are deployed in conjunction with a sequence of unexpected moves, a firm tends to obtain superior financial performance. We developed propositions to formalize a few principles for firms to strategically increase the complexity of DCMs to seize fleeting competitive advantages in turbulent business environments.

Nov 22 – Ning Su to present “The Emergence of Transactions on Crowdsourcing Platforms: A Cognitive Frame Perspective”

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The Emergence of Transactions on Crowdsourcing Platforms: A Cognitive Frame Perspective

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Ning Su

Ning Su

Associate Professor
General Management, Strategy & Information Systems
Ivey Business School
Western University, Canada

Friday, November 22

10:30 – 12:00 pm | Speakman 200

Abstact:

Crowdsourcing has been rapidly emerging as an important model of organizing in today’s global labor market. Leveraging digital platforms as intermediary, crowdsourcing facilitates market transactions by matching solution seekers’ needs with service suppliers’ skills. This matchmaking process, however, can be complex and challenging in the presence of a multitude and variety of seekers and suppliers with diverse background and knowledge structures. Based on an in-depth qualitative case study of one of the world’s largest crowdsourcing platforms for knowledge-intensive services, especially creative services, and drawing on the concept of cognitive frame, this research unpacks how market transactions emerge on crowdsourcing platforms. The result conceptualizes crowdsourcing as a process of framing contests between potential exchange partners. By designing a portfolio of mechanisms, the digital platform facilitates the representation, negotiation and acceptance of exchange frames between potential partners. Overall, the study develops and elaborates a socially constructed view of market transactions on crowdsourcing platforms.

Nov 1 – Idris Adjerid to present “Consumer Consent and Firm Targeting after GDPR: The Case of a Large Telecom Provider”

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Consumer Consent and Firm Targeting after GDPR: The Case of a Large Telecom Provider

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Idris Adjerid

Associate Professor
Pamplin College of Business
Virginia Tech

Friday, November 1

10:30 – 12:00 pm | Speakman 200

Abstact:

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDRP) represents a dramatic shift in global privacy regulation. In this manuscript, we focus on the impact of GDPR’s enhanced consumer consent requirements that focus on transparent and active elicitation of data allowances. We evaluate the effect of enhanced consent on consumer opt-in behavior and firm targeting after consent is solicited. Utilizing an experiment at a large telecommunications provider with operations in Europe, we find that opt-in for different data types and uses increased once GDPR-compliant consent was elicited. We also find that firm targeting, revenue, and lock-in increased after consumer consent was elicited. Our analysis suggests that these gains to the firm are because of the ability to utilize more targeted marketing campaigns after consumers provide additional data allowances. Our results have significant implications for firms and policymakers and provide insights relevant to the emerging debate on the balance between consumer privacy protection and firms’ collection and use of personal information.

Oct 11 – D.J. Wu to present “Platform Competition under Network Effects: Piggybacking and Optimal Subsidization”

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Platform Competition under Network Effects: Piggybacking and Optimal Subsidization

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D. J. Wu

Ernest Scheller Jr. Chair in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Commercialization
Professor, Area Coordinator, Information Technology Management
Georgia Institute of Technology
Scheller College of Business

Friday, October 11

10:30 – 12:00 pm | Speakman 200

Abstact:

A repeated challenge in launching a two-sided market platform is how to solve the “chicken-and-egg” problem. The solution often suggested in the literature is subsidizing one side of the market to jumpstart adoption of the platform. In this paper, using a game-theoretic framework, we study piggybacking — importing users from external networks — as a new approach to launching platforms. Our finding suggests that optimal use of the piggybacking strategy depends on the cross-side network effects. First, benchmarked with the case of no piggybacking, we find that the pricing impacts of piggybacking is non-trivial. It may help mitigate or avoid price competition. Second, we show that platform duopoly with piggybacking can become a “game of chicken” or even a prisoner’s dilemma, which implies that platforms are not always better off (sometimes even worse off) with piggybacking. Finally, when piggybacking users are fabricated (e.g., zombies or fake users), the platform strategies differ greatly from the authentic piggybacking case. It also undermines both the competing platform’s profit and the providers’ surpluses. Managerial implications for platform practitioners are also discussed

Oct 4 – Dennis Galletta to present “Which Phish will Bite? Two Studies of Individual Susceptibility to Phishing”

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Which Phish will Bite? Two Studies of Individual Susceptibility to Phishing

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Dennis Galletta

Dennis Galletta

Ben L. Fryrear Faculty Fellow, Professor of Business Administration, Director of the Doctoral Program
University of Pittsburgh
Katz Graduate School of Business

Friday, October 4

10:30 – 12:00 pm | Speakman 200

Abstact:

Phishing, or the practice of sending deceptive electronic communications to acquire private information from victims, results in significant financial losses to individuals and businesses. I will cover two studies in the area of phishing. The first study attempts to identify and test situational and personality factors that might explain why certain individuals are susceptible to such attacks. We employed the Delphi method to identify seven personality factors that may influence this susceptibility (trust, distrust, curiosity, entertainment drive, boredom proneness, lack of focus, and risk propensity). Our regression model included these as well as variables examined in previous studies. We found that emails sent from a known source significantly increase user susceptibility to phishing, as does a user’s curiosity, risk propensity, general Internet usage, and Internet anxiety. In post hoc tests, we also find that trust and distrust can be significant predictors of susceptibility and that this significance is dependent on the characteristics of the message. However, the results are rather weak and do not explain more than 10% of the variance in individuals’ propensity to click on a link in a phishing message. The second study, in process, follows from the weak results of the first study, which approaches the antecedents to clicking on a phishing message in a different manner. We focus on heredity in this study and in our study of twins, preliminary analysis has found that heredity explains over 40% of the variance in the ability of people to discern real websites and emails from fake ones. Our first three phishing attempts largely failed, with a very low propensity of anyone to click (contrary to our first study). We have since expanded our sample, verifying email addresses right at the subject recruiting site, and are currently preparing to phish the subjects over two dozen further times. Discerning the role of heredity might help practitioners understand the need to follow up, rather than simply assuming that all users respond similarly (and immediately) to warnings and training provided to them.

Reference: Moody, G.D., Galletta, D.F. & Dunn, B.K. Eur J Inf Syst (2017) 26: 564. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41303-017-0058-x

Link to the first paper: Click here

May 3 – Sirkka Jarvenpaa to Present “BioData Sourcing and Appropriation: The Case of Genomics”

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BioData Sourcing and Appropriation: The Case of Genomics

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Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa

Professor of Information Systems and Bayless/Rauscher Chair in Business Administration
McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin

Friday, May 3, 2019

10:30 AM – 12:00 PM

Speakman Hall Suite 200

 

Abstract

Discussions of “big data” often focus on algorithms, decision-making, and visualization, without comparable attention to the data per se. Attention to data is also missing in studies on information systems sourcing and digital entrepreneurship. Research on data supply chains often takes an organizational perspective and focuses on privacy, ownership, and security rather than on the data and its use for varied market and nonmarket uses among heterogeneous users in an interorganizational or community context. This void in research on data sourcing and appropriation is unfortunate as data infrastructures are critical arenas for collaboration but also competition in many ecosystems involving data providers, intermediaries, and diverse users. Not just firms, but also communities and nations are competing to grow their data sources and appropriate value particularly in the area of genomics and health. The presentation explores biodata sourcing and appropriation with the specific focus on genomics data and their associated tensions. The study of data sourcing focuses on what is different in partnerships in biodata (genomics) sourcing from what is commonly focused in partnerships in IS sourcing. The study on bio data appropriation focuses on entrepreneurial companies’ strategies leveraging open genomics data.

Bio 

Dr. Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa is Professor of Information Systems and Bayless/Rauscher Chair in Business Administration at the McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin. At The University of Texas at Austin, she serves as the Director of the Center for Business, Technology and Law. She has held many distinguished appointments such as the Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School. She was the first woman to hold the title of Finnish Distinguished (Fidipro) Professor. Her work has appeared in information systems, management, accounting, marketing, engineering, psychology, and anthropology journals. She recently published a co-authored book “Words Matter: Communicating Effectively in the New Global Office.” Dr. Jarvenpaa has received numerous best paper awards in information systems and management journals. Dr. Jarvenpaa serves or has served as the senior editor or editor-in-chief for several journals: Journal of Association for Information Systems, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Organization Science. She holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Bowling Green State University and Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Business Administration from University of Minnesota. She is a recipient of Association of Information Systems (AIS) Fellow and LEO Awards (LEO stands for Life Time Achievement of Exceptional Global Contributions in the field of information systems). She has been awarded three honorary doctorates.

April 30 – Gordon Burtch to Present “Estimating the Economic Impact of ‘Humanizing’ Customer Service Chatbots”

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Estimating the Economic Impact of ‘Humanizing’ Customer Service Chatbots

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Gordon Burtch

Associate Professor, Information & Decision Sciences
Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

12:30 PM – 2:00 PM

Speakman Hall Suite 200

 

Abstract

We consider the economic impacts of ‘humanising’ AI-enabled autonomous customer service agents (chat-bots). Implementing a field experiment in collaboration with a dual channel clothing retailer based in the United States, we automate a used clothing buy-back process, such that individuals engage with the retailer’s autonomous chatbot to describe the used clothes they wish to sell, obtain a price offer, and (if they accept the offer) print a shipping label to finalize the transaction. We causally estimate the impact on transaction conversion and price sensitivity from randomly exposing consumers to (1) exogenous variation in price offers, in tandem with (2) exogenously varied levels of chatbot anthropomorphism, operationalized by incorporating a random draw from a set of three anthropomorphic features: humor, communication delays and social presence. We provide evidence of a non-linear relationship, consistent with the ‘Uncanny Valley’ effect documented in the HCI-literature. That is, we show that while introducing either a small (1 treatment) or large (3 treatments) degree of anthropomorphism increases conversion rates substantially (on the order of 10% in the latter case), introducing only a moderate level (2 treatments) is counterproductive. Moreover, we show that a large degree of anthropomorphism (3 treatments) causally increases consumers’ price sensitivity. We argue that this latter effect occurs because, as a chatbot becomes more human-like, consumers shift from a price-taking mindset into a fairness evaluation or negotiating mindset. We discuss the implications for the implementation of AI-enabled autonomous agents in human-facing job roles, and customer service settings in particular.

April 26 – Balaji Padmanabhan to Present “Showing to be Seen: Using Data Science to Discover TV Programs for Public Health Announcements”

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Showing to be Seen: Using Data Science to Discover TV Programs for Public Health Announcements

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Balaji Padmanabhan

Professor, Information Systems & Decision Sciences

Muma College of Business, University of South Florida

Friday, April 26, 2019

10:30 AM – noon

Speakman Hall Suite 200

 

Abstract

Television is a prominent channel for educating the public about chronic health conditions. This study presents a methodology for selecting TV programs for public health campaigns targeted to the at-risk individuals. Through high-dimensional analysis of a large dataset on TV viewership of the entire U.S. panel in 2016 the methodology first inductively discovers programs whose popularities are correlated with eight chronic conditions and risk factors. A series of nonparametric tests then examine the robustness of findings and verify that a significant portion of the correlations is genuine—that is, not all the discovered correlations are accidental due to the “curse of dimensionality.” We then use Facebook’s split testing platform and run a series of online experiments to compare the effectiveness of targeting the shows discovered by the methodology with those that were targeted by the major 2016 public health campaigns. The experimental results corroborate the potential value of the methodology, which opens up a potentially new set of programs for public health officials to consider in their efforts to combat a range of conditions that are significantly expensive both in human lives and cost to the economy.

April 19 – Alessandro Acquisti to Present “The Sense of Privacy”

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The Sense of Privacy

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Alessandro Acquisti

Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy, PwC William W. Cooper Professor of Risk and Regulatory Innovation

Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University

Friday, April 19, 2019

10:30 AM – noon

Speakman Hall Suite 200

 

Abstract

Many factors affect privacy behavior in both conscious and unconscious manners. Some of those factors are sensorial cues: hearing, seeing, or smelling the presence of others. Human beings may be wired to react to those cues even when they do not carry information about actual trade-offs associated with privacy choices, and thus should not normatively influence privacy calculus.  In four experiments (N=829), we examine the effect on privacy-relevant behavior (the disclosure of personal information) of sensorial cues signaling the presence of other humans, including cases when that presence does not materially affect risks or benefits associated with personal disclosures. Four types of sensorial cues (proximity, visual, auditory, and olfactory), each signaling the presence of another person around the participant’s physical space, produce a consistent and significant inhibitory effect on disclosure of personal, intimate information in an online survey. The findings suggest a visceral, and in part unconscious, influence of sensorial stimuli on privacy choices. We discuss the implications of the findings in the context of privacy (and security) decision making in a digital age, where physical cues human beings may have adapted to use for detection of threats may be absent or even manipulated by third parties.

Bio

Alessandro Acquisti is a Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and the PwC William W. Cooper Professor of Risk and Regulatory Innovation. He is the director of the Peex (Privacy Economics Experiments) lab at CMU, and the co-director of Carnegie Mellon’s CBDR (Center for Behavioral and Decision Research). Alessandro investigates the economics of privacy. His studies have spearheaded the investigation of privacy and disclosure behavior in online social networks, and the application of behavioral economics to the study of privacy and information security decision making. Alessandro has been the recipient of the PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, the IBM Best Academic Privacy Faculty Award, the IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Innovation, Heinz College School of Information’s Teaching Excellence Award, and numerous Best Paper awards. His studies have been published in journals, books, and proceedings across a variety of fields, including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Management Science, Journal of Economic Literature, Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Journal of Experimental Psychology. Alessandro has testified before the U.S. Senate and House committees on issues related to privacy policy and consumer behavior, and has been frequently invited to consult on privacy policy issues by various government bodies, including the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Council of Economic Advisers, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and the European Commission. Alessandro’s findings have been featured in national and international media outlets, including the Economist, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, Wired.com, NPR, CNN, and 60 Minutes; his TED talks on privacy and human behavior have been viewed over 1.2 million times online. His 2009 study on the predictability of Social Security numbers was featured in the “Year in Ideas” issue of the NYT Magazine (the SSNs assignment scheme was changed by the US Social Security Administration in 2011). Alessandro holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, and Master degrees from UC Berkeley, the London School of Economics, and Trinity College Dublin. He has held visiting positions at the Universities of Rome, Paris, and Freiburg (visiting professor); Harvard University (visiting scholar); University of Chicago (visiting fellow); Microsoft Research (visiting researcher); and Google (visiting scientist). He has been a member of the National Academies’ Committee on public response to alerts and warnings using social media, he is a member of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), and he is a Carnegie Fellow (inaugural class).