Decision, Operations & Information Technologies

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2230

Prior to January 4, 2009, this unit was named Decision & Information Technologies.

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End date: 2019Subject: search.filters.subject.Business Administration, Management

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 14
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    UNDERSTANDING CONSUMERS' ONLINE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL AND SEARCH: IMPLICATIONS FOR FIRM STRATEGIES
    (2010) Ramachandran, Vandana; Viswanathan, Siva; Lucas, Hank; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The growth of the Internet and other digitization technologies has enabled the unbundling of the physical and information components of the value chain and has led to an explosion of information made available to consumers. Understanding the implications of this new informational landscape for theory and practice is one of the key objectives of my research. My dissertation seeks to understand how firms can use their knowledge of online consumer search and information seeking behaviors to design optimal information provision strategies. The main premise is that consumers' online search behaviors are key to understanding consumers' underlying information needs and preferences. In my first essay I specifically focus on big-ticket, high-involvement goods for which firms essentially have sparse information on their potential buyers - making information reflected in consumers' online search very valuable to online retailers. I use a new and rich source of clickstream data obtained from a leading clicks-and-mortar retailer to model consumers' purchase outcomes as a function of the product and price information provided by the retailer, and find interesting differences for sessions belonging to customers classified as browsers, directed shoppers and deliberating researchers. Since consumers typically straddle online as well as traditional channels, the second essay in my dissertation examines how online information acquired by consumers affects their choices in offline used-good markets. Secondary markets characterized by information asymmetries have typically resorted to quality-signaling mechanisms such as certification to help reduce the associated frictions. However, the value of traditional quality signals to consumers depends crucially on the extent of the asymmetries in these markets. The online information available to consumers today may help bridge such asymmetries. Drawing upon a unique and extensive dataset of over 12,000 consumers who purchased used vehicles, I examine the impact of their information acquisition from online intermediaries on their choice of (reliance on) one such quality signal - certification, as well as the price paid. These findings will help firms to better understand how the provision of different types of online information impacts consumers' choices and outcomes, and therefore help them in designing better and targeted strategies to interact with consumers.
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    IT is Risky Business: Three Essays on Ensuring Reliability, Security and Privacy in Technology-Mediated Settings
    (2010) Anderson, Catherine Long; Agarwal, Ritu; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Today's interconnected technical environment creates unprecedented opportunities while simultaneously introducing risks. With economic, social and personal interactions increasingly occurring in technology-mediated settings new vulnerabilities are continually being introduced. In this dissertation, I develop 3 essays which seek to improve extant understanding of how organizations and individuals respond to such risks and manage the new vulnerability. The common thread underlying the studies is that the focal risk is inherently caused by the rapid digitization and dependence on information technology that has permeated economic and social activity. Essay 1 addresses the increasing dependence of organizations on the reliability of their information technology (IT) infrastructure. I draw on organizational reliability literature to classify IT infrastructure failures and theorize how collective mindfulness can change the way organizations respond to each type of failure. The results support the necessity of examining collective mindfulness at the level of its processes (versus using the omnibus measure) and provide insights into the value of collective mindfulness depending on the failure type. Essay 2 synthesizes research from information systems, communication, and psychology to form a conceptual model explicating the role played by type of information requested, the purpose for which it is to be used, and the requesting stakeholder in an individual's willingness to disclose personal health information. Further, the model incorporates the impact of emotion linked to one's health condition on willingness to disclose. Results show that emotion plays a significant role in the disclosure decision and suggest that contextual factors related to the requesting stakeholder and the intended purpose of use moderate the relationships between concern and trust on willingness to disclose personal health information. Essay 3 explores ways to minimize the perception that one is invulnerable to a security violation through an examination of the influence of message cues on computer user security-related optimistic bias and security behavior intentions. Results from experiment 1 confirm an interactive influence of self-view and risk domain frame (social or financial) on security-related intentions. Experiment 2 suggests an interactive relationship between self-view and goal frame on optimistic bias but that influence did not translate into similar changes to intentions.
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    Impact of Leadership on Continued Participation in Online Groups
    (2008-11-20) Johnson, Steven L.; Faraj, Samer; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Online groups formed by volunteer members are increasingly recognized as sources of innovative ideas, as producers of information goods, and as a critical component for successful product marketing. Compared to formal organizations, online groups appear as anarchic collections of individuals largely devoid of formal authority. Yet online groups develop strong group norms, successfully generate information goods, and satisfy member needs--outcomes that seem impossible without some form of leadership by influential members. Research on open-membership voluntary online groups has consistently found that contribution to online groups is dominated by a small percentage of participants. The goal of this research is to better understand the role of leadership in online groups and to evaluate the impact of leadership in maintaining online groups by supporting continued participation intentions of existing members. I explored three related questions regarding leadership in online groups. First, does member interaction with group leaders contribute to continued participation intentions over and above a model based on past participation? Second, do shared context and direct communication with leaders impact continued participation intentions? And third, do group characteristics--group psychological safety, group size, and perceived number of leaders--moderate the relationship between group members and group leaders? I collected 535 survey responses from members of thirty-three different online groups (average of sixteen members per group) and also analyzed group communication history (a total of 135,477 messages). This cross-level analysis furthers our understanding of the relationship between interaction with group leadership, psychological safety, participation role intentions, and turnover intentions. I found that leadership in online groups is a determinant of online group outcomes. Online group leaders shape the group context, including psychological safety, which encourages or discourages participation. This study shows that leadership processes, group context, and differentiation among dimensions of participation intentions are all important considerations for further understanding of online groups.
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    The Work Network Model: Understanding the interplay of actor, artifact, and action in technology-based change
    (2008-10-29) Yeow, Yong Kwang; Faraj, Samer; Agarwal, Ritu; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Organization and IS scholars interested in the impact of IT on organizational change have acknowledged the indeterminate relationship between technological and organizational change. This reality stems from the complex interaction of the institutional context with human cognition and action that determine the path that technological change take in order to bring about organizational outcomes. Yet in this milieu there is little account for why specific context or conditions are salient. The goal of this research is to understand how technological change is related to organizational change by opening up the blackbox of the work context and analyze how the material aspects of the IT artifact relate to the actors and their actions. Specifically, I studied 1) How do the design and implementation of an EMR system impact the configuration of the system? 2) How do users and their practices interact with the configured system? 3) How do these interactions influence organizational outcomes so that one site is more "successful" than another? I explore these research questions using the perspective of work an organization is engaged in, specifically how IT artifacts are relationally linked to actors, actions and the organizational context. As my research questions deal with a process issue, I conducted a longitudinal field study of an EMR system implementation beginning from the implementation phase to deployment and use phases. I analyzed archival, interviews and observations data to develop a grounded theory of technology-based organizational change. Based on my findings I developed the Work Network Model of technology-based change. The model proposes that the main mechanism of change is the network within the context of an organization's work. It also proposed that analyzing the process of multi-level political negotiations during the configuration of a new technology allows us to understand how technology-change evolve once it is introduced in an organization. Finally it shows how institutional, infrastructural and work practices play a role both during the configuration and use phase of the new technology. Apart from its theoretical contributions, this research attempts to provide a new method to consider and design work practices with new technologies via the Work Network lens.
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    Absorptive Capacity And Open Source Software Project Performance
    (2007-12-04) Daniel, Sherae Lee; Agarwal, Ritu; Stewart, Katherine; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The open source phenomenon is an exciting movement that is transforming traditional forms of software development. Some open source software (OSS) projects, such as Linux and Apache, are performing extremely well and rapidly replacing proprietary software in major corporations and governments. In addition to these highly publicized examples, there are legions of OSS projects that have not experienced a similar uptake. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand how and why some OSS projects are able to perform better than others. It explores antecedents of OSS project performance from a knowledge-focused perspective because software development is a knowledge-intensive activity. In particular, it examines the development and effects of absorptive capacity for an OSS project. Absorptive capacity captures the degree to which an organization is able to acquire and assimilate knowledge. In describing how OSS absorptive capacity is developed, this dissertation identifies characteristics and behaviors of project participants that indicate an OSS project's absorptive capacity. I underscore the importance of the characteristics and behaviors of two different sets of project participants in an OSS project: those in the Internet-based user community and those in the development group. To the extent that absorptive capacity influences OSS project performance, I argue that these characteristics and behaviors are critical for OSS project performance. Archival data about OSS projects that use the SourceForge platform are used to empirically test the model developed. This dissertation makes several contributions to theory and practice. The research informs project managers regarding the participants to target and behaviors to encourage that will lead to superior performance for their OSS project. In exploring the effect of absorptive capacity in an OSS project, this dissertation adds to the absorptive capacity literature by examining the interaction of two dimensions of this construct: knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer. Finally, this dissertation extends the OSS literature by specifically exploring the effect of the Internet-based user community on OSS project performance.
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    The Impact Of Online Sponsored Search Advertising On Consumer And Seller Strategies
    (2007-08-07) Animesh, Animesh; Agarwal, Ritu; Viswanathan, Siva; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Sponsored search advertising has emerged as an important and significant forum for advertisers, accounting for 40% of all advertising spending online. The unique features of sponsored search advertising - the nature of consumer search as well as the pricing mechanisms employed - differentiate it from traditional advertising formats, and raise many interesting questions regarding consumers' search and purchase behavior, sellers' advertising strategies, and the ensuing market dynamics. However, despite the robust growth in sponsored search advertising, research on its implications is limited. My dissertation, comprising three essays, seeks to fill this gap. In addition to examining the effects of sponsored search advertising on consumers and sellers, I also investigate the validity of theories developed for traditional media in an emerging online sponsored search context. The first essay focuses on the impact of a seller's sponsored search advertising strategies, including its rank in the sponsored listing, the unique selling proposition (USP) employed in its advertisement text/creative, and competitive market dynamics on the performance of the focal seller's advertisement. Drawing upon prior research on consumer search and directional markets, I propose a model of the consumer search process in the sponsored search context and conduct an empirical study to test the research model. The results validate the research hypothesis that the search listing can act as a consumer filtering mechanism and competitive intensity within adjacent ranks has a significant impact on the seller's performance. The second essay employs consumer search and quality signaling theories from information systems, marketing, and economics to understand the impact of the informational cues contained in the sponsored search listing about sellers' relative advertising expenditure on consumer search and purchase behavior. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I find that the unique format of the sponsored search listing significantly increases the strength of the advertising signal vis-à-vis the price signal. In addition, I find that the risk attitude of consumers has a significant impact on the valence of these different information cues in the online setting. The third essay examines market outcomes in directional markets such as sponsored search and comparison shopping advertising. Specifically, I focus on comparison shopping advertising where advertising not only informs consumers about price and quality but also directs consumer search. I find that the relationship between a firm's price, quality, and advertising intensity in this market is strikingly different from that in traditional markets, a result attributable to the differential impact of price and quality on an advertiser's conversion rates and profit margins. Overall, these studies provide crucial insights into consumer behavior in online sponsored search markets. These findings have significant implications for firms, as well as for the market makers. Insights from these studies will enable practitioners to develop appropriate advertising strategies and online intermediaries to optimize the design of online sponsored search markets.
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    Information Technology and Its Transformational Effect on the Health Care Industry
    (2007-04-25) Angst, Corey M; Agarwal, Ritu; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation examines the adoption of health IT by addressing the barriers to adoption from the perspective of multiple stakeholders. I examine three different phenomena using alternative methodologies and theoretical lenses. Essay 1: The Impact of Firm Characteristics and Spatial Proximity on the Diffusion of Electronic Medical Records: A Hazard Modeling Analysis. This study, positioned at the inter-organizational level, draws upon adoption and diffusion literature to predict the likelihood of EMR adoption by hospitals. I theorize that adoption is driven by factors such as the concentration and experience with complementary HIT and an environmental factor, spatial proximity. Using a hazard model fitted to data from a sample drawn from almost 4,000 hospitals, I find support for a positive relationship between IT concentration and likelihood of adoption. I also find that spatial proximity explains variance in adoption and that its effect diminishes as distance increases. Essay 2: Isolating the Effects of IT on Performance: An Empirical Test of Complementarities and Learning. An issue at the organizational level is whether benefits result from investment in HIT. I apply a knowledge-based lens to the examination of IT adoption and process-level value, incorporating the effects of learning occurring through complementary IT adoption. I test hypotheses using data from almost 400 nationally-representative hospitals matched with quality and financial performance data and find that learning associated with more experience with IT leads to superior performance. Essay 3: Adoption of Electronic Medical Records in the Presence of Privacy Concerns: The Elaboration Likelihood Model and Individual Persuasion. At the individual level, privacy concerns can inhibit the adoption of EMRs. I draw from literature on attitude change to develop hypotheses that individuals can be persuaded to support the use, and ultimately opt-in to EMRs, even in the presence of significant privacy concerns if compelling arguments about the value of EMRs are presented. Using a quasi-experimental methodology, I find that privacy concerns interact with argument framing and issue involvement to affect attitudes toward the use of EMRs. In addition, results suggest that attitude towards EMR use and CFIP directly impact the likelihood of adoption of EMR technology.
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    Electronic Mediation, Transformation, and Business Value: Three Essays in the Retail Auto Industry
    (2006-10-25) Kuruzovich, Jason Nicholas; Agarwal, Ritu; Decision and Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation seeks to answer the following research questions: (1) what properties enable some organizations to generate more value from information technology (IT) than others? and (2) through what mechanisms do organizations generate value through IT? It examines the role of technology in value creation through three essays using three different aspects of organizational performance. Chapter 1: Responding to Technology-Enabled Organizational Transformation: The Role of Strategic Change Orientation Essay one examines the role of strategic change orientation and three change enablers--IT capabilities, climate for IT use, and mindfulness of IT adoption--in influencing business process performance during a period of IT-enabled transformation. The data source for this essay is a survey of auto retailers facilitated by a leading online infomediary. Chapter 2: Profiting From the Internet Channel: The Complementarity of Electronic Commerce Capabilities and Business Process Change Essay two accesses the joint role of electronic commerce capabilities and business process change in a model that examines the value firms derive from the Internet channel. The data source for this essay is a survey of auto retailers conducted by a leading market research firm. Chapter 3: Understanding Retailer Use of Online Auction Channels: Strategies In Repeated Search Processes Essay three examines sellers' use of the online auction market and the resulting value obtained for a given product through the theoretical lens of search theory. We model sellers' repeated listing of unsold products and adjustment of reserve price as a process of searching for high valuation customers. The data source for this essay is transactional data from a leading online auction site specializing in automobiles.
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    Coordinating Demand Fulfillment With Supply Across A Dynamic Supply Chain
    (2006-04-25) Chen, Maomao; Ball, Michael; Decision and Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Today, technology enables companies to extend their reach in managing the supply chain and operating it in a coordinated fashion from raw materials to end consumers. Order promising and order fulfillment have become key supply chain capabilities which help companies win repeat business by promising orders competitively and reliably. In this dissertation, we study two issues related to moving a company from an Available to Promise (ATP) philosophy to a Profitable to Promise (PTP) philosophy: pseudo order promising and coordinating demand fulfillment with supply. To address the first issue, a single time period analytical ATP model for n confirmed customer orders and m pseudo orders is presented by considering both material constraints and production capacity constraints. At the outset, some analytical properties of the optimal policies are derived and then a particular customer promising scheme that depends on the ratio between customer service level and profit changes is presented. To tackle the second issue, we create a mathematical programming model and explore two cases: a deterministic demand curve or stochastic demand. A simple, yet generic optimal solution structure is derived and a series of numerical studies and sensitivity analyses are carried out to investigate the impact of different factors on profit and fulfilled demand quantity. Further, the firm's optimal response to a one-time-period discount offered by the supplier of a key component is studied. Unlike most models of this type in the literature, which define variables in terms of single arc flows, we employ path variables to directly identify and manipulate profitable and non-profitable products. Numerical experiments based on Toshiba's global notebook supply chain are conducted. In addition, we present an analytical model to explore balanced supply. Implementation of these policies can reduce response time and improve demand fulfillment; further, the structure of the policies and our related analysis can give managers broad insight into this general decision-making environment.
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    Essays on Agility in Software Development Teams: Process and Governance Perspectives
    (2006-04-19) Maruping, Likoebe Mohau; Agarwal, Ritu; Venkatesh, Viswanath; Decision and Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Software project teams are often faced with the potential for changing requirements during software development. Such changes present a significant challenge to software project teams often resulting in cost overruns, missed deadlines, and faulty code. While the phenomenon of requirements changes by itself is not new, the frequency with which such changes occur has increased in recent years. Software project teams continue to be challenged by the uncertainty caused by the potential for such changes. Flexibility has been identified as a desirable characteristic of teams in this type of environment. This dissertation is made up of two essays that examine the processes and governance mechanisms that can potentially enable software project teams to achieve greater flexibility. The first essay provides a team process-oriented view of the problem. Specifically, agile programming practices and boundary spanning activities are argued to enhance software project team effectiveness by receiving customer feedback and incorporating requirements changes on an on-going basis. A longitudinal field study of 56 software development teams provides support for these arguments. The second essay adopts a team governance lens. Specifically, formal and informal control modes are posited to influence software project team effectiveness. Control mechanisms that promote team autonomy and flexibility are argued to positively influence software project team effectiveness. Further, team leader behaviors are also expected to play a critical role in facilitating software project team effectiveness. These arguments are tested and largely supported. Together, the two essays shed light on how software project teams can be designed to have greater flexibility--an important stepping stone for managing software development in the face of requirements uncertainty.