PROGRAM DETAILS

	Saturday April 5 9:15 – 10:00 AM CITD Room 108 Speaker: Andrew Whinston, Center for Research in Electronic Commerce, University of Texas Title: The Challenge of Doing Innovative IS Research

 

The Challenge of Doing Innovative IS Research

Two interesting events have occurred recently which are probably unrelated but present important challenges to the IS field. The first is the sudden occurrence of a concern about what should be considered legitimate IS research by trying to define what it is (the importance of the IT artifact) and to suggest that what it isn’t should not be published in IS journals. The extent that the IT artifact is part of a research paper is not that easily determined and may be based on an individual’s judgment rather than have a scientific basis. Non-tenured faculty and doctoral students may pursue research which resembles recent publications in order to minimize the risk of rejection from a research journal. Thus really innovative research would be inhibited. The second event is the significant drop in IT enrollment in business schools. The latter, if not altered, could result in a dramatic reduction in IT faculty and with the current tenure structure virtually no market demand for new graduates. The presentation will analyze the call for purity in IS research by arguing that while recognizing the IT artifact is an important ingredient in the research, IT research must move beyond its current boundaries to contribute to and integrate concepts from related disciplines. To illustrate these ideas, various examples of ongoing research will be presented. My belief is that expanding the research boundaries will provide the intellectual basis for creating an array of new courses that should benefit enrollment.

Dr. Whinston’s Distinguished Bio

Dr. Andrew Whinston is the Hugh Roy Cullen Centennial Chair Professor in Information Systems at the Graduate School of Business in the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Professor in the departments of Economics and Computer Science as well.  Dr. Whinston is a Fellow of the IC2 Institute, Austin and is the director of the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce, for several years a pioneering research facility in Electronic Commerce. Under his stewardship, the Center identified the potential of electronic commerce early on, and made significant contributions in theoretical aspects of business and technological practice in this new frontier, and developed cutting edge applications that facilitate and demonstrate strategies for this marketplace. The hallmark of research under his guidance has been an integrated vision spanning cross- disciplinary efforts, thus bringing technological, business, economic, public policy, sociological, cryptographic and political concerns together in laying the theoretical and practical foundations of a digital economy. His collaborators, accordingly, have included faculty, students, researchers, and industry personnel from diverse disciplines.

His current research spans various realms of Electronic Commerce, its impact on business protocols and processes, on organizational structure and corporate networks, electronic publishing, electronic education, complementarity of convergent computational paradigms and business value of IT. Through diverse initiatives, various aspects and consequences of the emergent economies over the Internet and corporate Intranets are studied.

	Saturday April 5 10:30 am – 12:00 –m CITD Various Rooms Breakout Sessions Session Coordinator: Bob Zmud, University of Oklahoma

 

The purpose of these sessions is to enable people with similar research interests to get to know one another in order that future interactions might arise.  These groups have been put together by examining the research interests each attendee denoted when registering. 

We would like each group to do the following:

1. Begin by having each person introduce himself/herself and then describing the current research projects with which they are involved that would fit the group theme.
2. Elect a group spokesman.  We would prefer that the spokesman be a doctoral student.
3. Generate and agree on a list of the top three (3) to five (5) problems in the group’s them from a “Practice Perspective.”  In other words, what does the group believe to be the practice community’s most important concerns regarding the group’s theme?
4. At the conclusion of the session, copy your list onto the provided transparency.
5. At lunch, each group spokesmen will describe their list.

Tentative Group Assignments

RESEARCH PRESENTATION SESSIONS

	Saturday April 5 Session 1 (1:30 – 3:00 pm) CITD Room 108 Session Theme: Virtual Teams Session Chair: Anthony Hendrickson, Iowa State University

 

1. System Structure Design and Social Consequence: The Impact of Message Templates on Affectivity in Virtual Teams

Herbert Remidez

University of Missouri

hrb6f@mizzou.edu

Work and learning teams whose interactions are mediated entirely via Internet-based communication support applications, also called virtual teams, are emerging as commonplace. It is important for managers to understand how communication support applications affect the task-oriented and relationship-oriented goals of groups. The Cognitive-Affective Model of Organizational Communication for Designing Information Technology (CAMOC) [Te'eni, 2001 #5] offers suggestions for how the use of communication systems might promote emotional, or affective, development. Trust is a type of affect that has been shown to be important to the success of virtual teams [Jarvenppa, 1998 #3]; [Iacono, 1997 #8]; [Beranek, 2000 #10]. This presentation will review the CAMOC model and will report preliminary results from a study designed to examine how a template-driven asynchronous discussion board intended to support trust formation affected the development of the antecedents of trust, the perception of trustworthiness, and overall communication patterns in virtual teams.

2. Toward an Integrative Theory of Trust in Virtual Teams

André L. Araujo

University of Oklahoma

altaraujo2@ou.edu

Virtual teams face major impediments to developing trust given their relative inability to evaluate other members’ abilities, motivations and work patterns.  However, trust is the foundation on which virtual teams can build effective performance strategies and accomplish group tasks.  Thus, members of virtual teams must overcome initial technological barriers to build trust.  Empirical evidence suggests that such trust can be developed, although it takes time to do so. A key factor, besides time, in developing trust is the task that the group is engaged in.  Since different types of tasks affect group processes and outcomes differently, the development of trust will vary according to the group’s task. This study seeks to build an integrative theory of trust in virtual teams by explicitly examining the interactions of task, technology and time and their combined impact on teams.  We also present a set of propositions distilled from empirical evidence and theoretical considerations to guide future research in this area.

	Saturday April 5 Session 2 (1:30 – 3:00 pm) CITD Room 101 Session Theme: Online Auctions Session Chair: Gary Hackbarth, Iowa State University

 

1. An All-Pay Auction Model Of Contest Promotions and Its Empirical Test Using Wireless Gaming Data

De Liu

University of Texas

de.liu@mail.utexas.edu

This research studies the incentive effect of contests aimed to promote consumer participation in the new interactive technology environment. The rapid diffusion of the Internet and wireless technologies has changed the rules of marketing. On the one hand, new technologies like TiVo® and Sonic Blue® increasingly threaten the classic TV advertising channels by allowing consumers to bypass ads. On the other hand, Internet and wireless technologies also create new interactive marketing channels by enabling two-way responsive interactions between firms and their customers. Attempting to take advantage of new technologies, consumer contests are often used. While many firms believe that contests are an effective tool to stimulate higher level of participation, there is a significant lack of theoretical and empirical work on how contests might work and on how to design those contests to embrace the interactive technology environment. We try to fill this gap by studying the incentive effects and optimal design of contest promotions.

This research consists of a theoretical analysis of contest promotions and subsequent empirical tests using wireless game data. The theoretical model of contest promotions builds its foundation on the recent development in the theory of contests in economics literature. Contests such as lobbying, R&D tournament, athletic and salesperson contests, are considered as all-pay auctions in the sense that contestants extend non-refundable effort to compete for prizes. We view contest promotions as incomplete-information all-pay auctions, where contestants (consumers), with different privately endowed abilities, choose their effort to compete for (monetary or non-monetary) prizes, whereas the sponsor (the firm) maximizes total effort. Using this model, we are able to characterize the equilibrium behavior of consumers, and to obtain interesting results with regard to optimal prize structure and optimal contest structure. In the empirical part of the research, we will estimate the incentive effects of contests and confront it with results predicted by the theoretical model. The wireless game dataset consists of a relatively complete computerized record of wireless game plays for individuals. While the dataset uniquely allows us to test theory of contests, the challenges are abundant in tasks in estimating abilities and separating intrinsic value effects and incentive effects.

2. Assessing Bidders’ Willingness to Pay in Multi-unit Progressive Online Auctions

Gilbert Karuga,

University of Kansas

gkaruga@ku.edu

This research seeks to gain a deeper insight into the price formation process of auctions that progressively reveal bidders willingness to pay (WTP), use those insights into deriving a priori estimates of the bidders bounds on the maximum willingness to pay. These predictions are a resource that can be used to increase the efficiency of the auctions through real-time calibration. We present an analytical model that predicts a consumer’s willingness to pay for a product, based on the joint consideration of the bidding strategy pursued and the bid values revealed, both of which are observable on the Internet. Subsequently, using an automated agent, we test the valuation prediction model against thousands of bids made on hundreds of real online auctions from Samsclub.com.

1. Adaption-Innovation Theory and IT Workers

Michael A. Chilton

Kansas State University

mchilton@ksu.edu

The theory of adaption-innovation posits that all people have a preferred cognitive style—a way in which they prefer to go about solving problems and performing work or other activities.  This preference affects how they generate ideas or potential solutions, how they view the details of their work and how they view the amount of structure imposed on them.  Adaptors prefer to improve established methods, or do things better; while innovators prefer to change current methods, or do things differently.  In the extreme, high adaptors prefer to work within the current paradigm and mold any new methods or techniques to match this paradigm; conversely, high innovators prefer to abandon the current paradigm as they often grow bored with it, and seek a new way of doing things that is much more interesting to them.  The theory suggests that these are preferred styles, and as such, people are able to work outside them, but that there is an emotional cost associated with this.  In addition, preferred cognitive style is independent of such things as performance, creativity and other outcome based measures, because both adaptors and innovators may exhibit superlative (or poor) performance and may demonstrate high (or low) amounts of creativity.  These outcomes are dependent on such things as intelligence, experience and education, not on preferred cognitive style.

The theory further suggests that these preferences comprise a bipolar continuum that ranges from highly adaptive to highly innovative.  It does not suggest that the scale is bimodal in nature, meaning that people are either highly adaptive or highly innovative.  To the contrary, the empirical data collected to date suggests that the continuum is normally distributed about the theoretical mean, which indicates that most people are neither highly adaptive nor highly innovative, but exhibit traits of both (or either) depending on the circumstances.  However, the data also suggest that because it is a continuum, people may find themselves in situations where they have to work with others who are far apart from them on the scale.  This phenomenon brings about the appearance that one person may be highly adaptive (or highly innovative) in comparison to the other.  When this occurs, either the work at hand begins to suffer and slow down, or one of the two must direct his emotional energy toward adjusting his preferred style.  This increase in emotional energy or “coping,” can have adverse effects on the performance of that person and/or his general health and well-being.

To understand the effects of the differences in preferred cognitive style, we must first understand the theory, and so a brief synopsis is provided.  A look at current research and how the theory is supported is provided next.  We can then probe more deeply into the minds of the high adaptor and the high innovator and discover when one style might be more advantageous than the other as it affects the work at hand.  Using this knowledge, we can look at some options for future research and how such investigations might affect both theory and practice.

2. IT Professional Work Identity: Constructs and Outcomes

Mari W. Buche

University of Kansas

mbuche@ku.edu

As technology continues to change at a rapid pace, Information Technology (IT) professionals are required to adapt to new tasks and enhanced roles. These continuous adaptations lead to alterations in their work identity, which is characterized by the internalization of job tasks, job environment, and social interactions. This study will elicit the determinants of IT professional work identity and facilitate an understanding of the phenomenon by describing factors that force IT professionals to change their work identity. In addition, the final analysis will discuss the impact of such changes on IT professional outcomes. The salient outcome variables, evoked using the revealed causal mapping (RCM) method, were identified as job satisfaction and organizational commitment, including intention to leave. Determinants include Job Characteristics (including social interactions) and Role Identity constructs, moderated by Attitudes Toward Work, Profession, and Change. The process of developing the model was iterative, combining data analysis results with existent literature in a continuous fashion, with the goal of producing a testable model. The second phase of the work involves testing the model for goodness of fit using survey data from IT professionals. It is anticipated that work identity will be a latent variable. This assumption will be tested using structural equation modeling technique.

This project is multidisciplinary, incorporating academic areas of Information Systems, Human Resources, Social and Cognitive Psychology, and Organizational Behavior. Foundational theories include social identity theory, self-categorization theory, social learning theory, IT personnel turnover theory, and occupational identity theory.

The multi-method study combines qualitative and quantitative techniques to investigate the IT professional work identity phenomenon. The methodology includes revealed causal mapping (RCM) of interviews with IT personnel and structural equation modeling to assess the fit of the work identity model. The academic contributions of this study are (1) identifying the determinants of work identity for IT professionals, (2) creation of a validated survey instrument, and (3) applying Revealed Causal Mapping methodology to studying the IT professional work identity phenomenon. Practitioners will benefit from suggestions for increasing retention of IT personnel, improving job satisfaction, and promoting organizational commitment in the work environment.

1. Failures in Application Development Outsourcing Contracts: The Affect of Service Quality, Relationship Quality, Satisfaction, and Switching Costs

Dwayne Whitten

Baylor University

dwayne_whitten@baylor.edu

Although outsourcing has increased over the last two decades (Lee and Kim, 1999), an estimated thirty-four (34%) of outsourcing contracts have failed, i.e., have resulted in switching to another vendor or backsourcing, the return of previously outsourced functions to in-house resources (Lacity and Willcocks, 2002).  Lacity and Willcocks (2000) have called for a thorough evaluation of outsourcing failures as one of the new directions for outsourcing research. A literature review reveals that little work has been completed in this important new area for further research. 

Grover, Cheon, and Teng (1996) studied the relationship of the five outsourcing components (application development and maintenance, systems operations, telecommunications and networks management, end-user support, and systems planning and management) with outsourcing success, as well as the effect of service quality on the relationships between the outsourcing components and outsourcing success. Results indicated that outsourcing is more successful with systems operations and telecommunications.  Their research found application development and maintenance to be more prone to failure than highly structured commodity services such as systems operations, telecommunications and networks management.  Therefore, in this study of outsourcing failure, the application development and maintenance component was selected.  Factors associated with the decision to discontinue these contracts, or more specifically switch vendors or backsource, will be studied using a survey administered to top computer executives across the United States whose job titles are analogous to Manager or Vice President of Application Development. The survey is based on previously validated instruments for measuring service quality (SERVQUAL) and satisfaction (UIS). Switching costs and relationship quality will be measured using slightly modified instruments from Jones, Mothersbaugh, and Beatty (2002) and Lee and Kim (1999) respectively.

The following hypotheses will be tested:

H1: Service quality is negatively associated with the decision to discontinue an application development outsourcing contract.
 
H2: Satisfaction is negatively associated with the decision to discontinue an application development outsourcing contract.

H3: Relationship quality is negatively associated with the decision to discontinue an application development outsourcing contract.

H4: Switching costs are negatively associated with the decision to discontinue an application development outsourcing contract.

Components of service quality include reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. Relationship quality is comprised of trust, commitment, communication quality, cultural compatibility, and interdependence. Satisfaction components include outsourcing vendor staff and services, outsourcing vendor services, information output, and knowledge and involvement. Switching costs include both tangible and intangible costs.

By better understanding the factors that may lead to outsourcing failure, outsourcing vendors can increase the success rate of outsourcing agreements and companies can make better outsourcing decisions. In addition, this research will provide an analysis of backsourcing and vendor switches, two increasingly important new areas of research.

2. Information Technology Project Selection within State Government

Kris Rosacker

University of Nebraska

Public and private sector organizations are investing in information technology at an increasing rate.  The Management Information Systems (MIS) literature, has examined the quantitative and qualitative methods utilized by private sector organizations to select among various information technology projects.  This literature indicates a universal method for evaluating these types of projects does not exist.  More specifically, the project selection methods employed are contingent upon the operating environment of the organization and/or industry under investigation. 

Research related to information technology project selection has ignored the public sector.  This is a significant omission for two substantive reasons.  First, the United States public sector is the largest procurer of information technology in the world.  Second, while the most basic driving factor of private sector organizations is their motive for profit, this motive does not exist within the public sector.  Given the magnitude of spending and the unique cultural characteristics of public sector organizations the topic of public sector information technology project selection warrants investigation.

The purpose of this project is to identify and describe the qualitative and quantitative methods used by state governments to select among multiple information technology projects.  Data for this study will be collected via structured phone interviews with the chief information officers of three mid-western states.  This paper will report the results of this preliminary investigation.

1. Managing Prosumers Knowledge as a Competitive Weapon in the Internet Market

Nitin Aggarwal

Texas Tech University

nitin.aggarwal@ttu.edu

The Web has become a crucial aspect of today’s business. Understanding how organizations use the Web to create value is critical for a firm’s survival and profitability Sustainability of competitive advantage has been identified as a key attribute in the success of any organization.  The new technology has created avenues for creative rethinking of business models, processes, and relationships.  There is now a stronger demand for an effective strategy, which in turn requires an understanding of usage of existing resources and creating them.  According to the resource-based theory, resource heterogeneity is the basis of firms’ competitive advantage.  A firm’s resource—characterized by its value, rarity, inimitability and nonsubstitutability—enables it to explore and create distinct strategic choices that it can exploit in order to improve its market position.  On similar thoughts, Ricardian economics argue that superior resources and capacities give opportunities to a firm for generating supernormal profit with lower average costs.  Knowledge has been identified as one such resource, but its scope has been limited to the collective organizational knowledge and an employee’s knowledge without any emphasis on external sources.  This study expands on the scope of knowledge to include customer-knowledge, called prosumers knowledge, as a source of creating value for other customers and, in turn, as a source of competitive advantage.  We differentiate prosumers knowledge from customers knowledge; former being knowledge possessed by the customers, largely dynamic in nature, interactive and responsibility of creation, interpretation and use lying with the customers themselves and latter being managers knowledge about customers, mostly static in nature and responsibility of interpretation lying with the employees or the organization.  In this study, we attempt to identify source and uses of different types of prosumers knowledge and qualify prosumers knowledge as a resource as defined by resource-based theory by evaluating its valuableness, rareness, inimitability and nonsubstitutability.  Furthermore, this study provides testable propositions, which emphasize prosumers knowledge as being a significant source of sustainable competitive advantage and that customers are capable of creating value for each other by exchanging knowledge.  This conceptualization is one of the first attempts in investigation prosumers knowledge and provides a formal framework for exploring how prosumers knowledge is generated, leading to identification of important constructs in obtaining competitive advantage. Identifying possible prosumers knowledge and understanding their roles and implications could provide companies a better insight for making strategic decisions regarding the web channels.

2. Explanation: What is it?

Dirk Hovorka

University of Colorado

Dirk.Hovorka@colorado.edu

Developing explanations of observed phenomenon is one of the major functions of research in Information Systems (IS). But what is an explanation?  What types of explanation can IS research provide and what do they mean?  There has been little discussion in the literature of what constitutes an explanation or how types of explanation may apply to IS research.  The purposes of this research are to develop a shared language,

to increase understanding of the meaning of research results and to stimulate discussion of this fundamental issue.  Types of explanation that appear in two top IS journals over a period of four years are classified.  Four explanation types defined in modern philosophy, covering-law, statistical-relevance, pragmatic and functional, are used to categorize articles.  The relationships between the explanation types and the epistemology, ontology and methods used to produce them are then examined.  Preliminary results of this research in progress will be presented during this discussion.

3. Reducing Information Overload: Decision Support for Knowledge Workers

Robert Greve

Oklahoma State University

greve@okstate.edu

Information overload is a problem that most would agree is only getting worse.  Information overload amounts to a bottleneck of knowledge work inputs. E-mail overload presents a decision problem for a knowledge worker.  The individual must decide how to better manage the processing scheme for e-mail messages.  A necessary ingredient in designing email-processing guidelines is a better understanding of the problem.  Only when we have a good handle on the problem, can we devise solutions, policies, and procedures aimed at tackling the problem.  The aim of this study is to model the process of knowledge work, specifically e-mail processing.  We will then illustrate the potential analytical value of the models in the assessment and reduction of information overload.  A plethora of tools exist for the analysis and optimization of conventional work (work with tangible inputs and outputs).  However, analysis tools for knowledge work are at best underdeveloped.  I present analytical models of the process of knowledge work, specifically the processing of electronic mail.  The models describe an individual knowledge worker as a processor with inputs and outputs.  Queuing theory and simulation are then used to analyze various processing schemes. 

1. The Impact of Website Design Effectiveness on Customer's Trusting Beliefs About a Pure Internet Vendor: A Conceptual Study

Radha Appan 

Vidhya Mellarkod

Texas Tech University

rappan@ttu.edu

The growth of Business-to-Consumer e-commerce has been slower than expected due to the fundamental lack of faith between e-retailers (retailers conducting business exclusively over the Internet) and e-shoppers(Ba & Pavlou, 2002; Bhattacherjee, 2002). Recognizing the importance of trust in e-relationships, extensive research has been done in this area (Corritore et al., 2001; McKnight & Chervany, 2001; Tan & Thoen, 2001; Lee & Turban, 2001). An analysis of the past research reveals that unlike brick and mortar firms that generate customer trust primarily through the personal interface between customers and retailers, e- retailers are forced to look at alternative avenues to generate trust. The most significant avenue available to e-retailers is their website. In order for the website to take up the critical role of a trust generator, adequate attention needs to be paid to its design. The area of website design effectiveness has attracted the attention of a number of researchers (Zhang et al., 2000; Song & Zahedi, 2001). However, little research has focused on the relationship between website design effectiveness and customer trust.

This paper aims at developing a conceptual framework that explains the impact of different website design factors on the customer’s trusting beliefs about the e-retailer. Website design factors have been categorized as hygiene, motivation, motivating-hygiene, and de-motivation factors based on an analogical use of dual factor theory of motivation (Herzberg, 1968) and the two factor theory of website design (Zhang et al., 2000). In order to study the impact of website design factors on customer’s trusting beliefs, the trusting belief construct has been operationalized as operational benevolence, operational competence, and operational integrity (McKnight et al., 2002; Sirdeshmukh et al., 2002).

The proposed conceptual model will benefit both e-retailers and researchers. E-retailers need to realize that website design factors play a significant role in enhancing the customer’s trusting beliefs. Since there is no pre-determined set of website design factors that can generate customer’s trusting beliefs in every situation, the e-retailers need to analyze the needs/beliefs of their customers and choose a set of factors that will build and maintain their trustworthiness image.  This study will provide a basic framework that will assist e-retailers in developing websites that focus on winning the target customers’ trust and thereby, their loyalty. The academic community can benefit from the conceptual framework as it provides a foundation for future research in this area.

2. Measuring Website Usability: Instrument Development, Validation, and Application

Younghwa Lee

University of Colorado

leey@colorado.edu

Developing a usable website is crucial for e-commerce, but there is no consensus on what website usability is, how to measure it, and its effects on online purchases.  This study first proposes an instrument with a number of website usability constructs, and investigates the causal relationship between the constructs.  In addition, the relationship with other online customer satisfaction variables and the stability of the newly developed instrument are tested under several boundary conditions.  A Pluralist methodology using both the structural equation modeling technique and the Revealed Causal Mapping(RCM) approach is applied.  The study will provide a useful guideline for web designers and management to measure and diagnose the usability level of current websites.

3. Stable Model-Based Software Design for Reuse and Maintenance

Majid Nabavi

University of Nebraska

Systems analysis and design in early steps of a software development project determines the architecture of the software, and hence is an essential step to provide a model that reduces maintenance efforts, provides extensibility to the software product under development, and designs software modules that are reusable for further upgrade of the system.  Software is developed based on a model that captures the essential aspects of the work system, so modeling that is a well-established human process is the key to a successful design of software. 

Conventional models of software development that focus on existing business processes in the problem domain do not satisfy these expectations because they are unstable when the problem evolves and new processes enter into the work system.  Model-based software design is expected to provide a higher level of reusability and lower level of maintenance than the conventional models.  The Software Stability Model (SSM) emphasizes model stability over changes, and offers an innovative approach to expressing the core purpose of a problem, and a method to develop extensible and stable models.

This case study reviews a business problem and using object-oriented notation, designs models to represent the system, both conventional and SSM.  Then several alternative systems that may involve in this business case and probably overlap during the time and due to change in technology are represented, modeled, and merged into a single, stable, and extensible model.  This case study demonstrates that investment in systems analysis and design in the initial steps of a software development project and selecting the proper model can well pay off during the later phases of the software life cycle.

	Saturday April 5 Session 7 (3:30 – 5:30 pm) CITD Room 102 Session Theme: E-Commerce Session Chair: Ali Amiri, Oklahoma State University

 

1. Online Shopping Experience: A Protocol Analysis Approach

Yi (Maggie) Guo

Texas A&M University

maggie-guo@tamu.edu

The Internet, with World Wide Web (Web), has impacts on many aspects of our everyday life, including shopping.  This research effort focuses on this very aspect, investigating consumer behavior in an online retailing environment.  Questions tried to tackle include how consumers behave on a commercial web site; how they feel about the interaction with a web site; what factors contribute to a positive attitude; and what are irritating, and why.  In order to study this phenomenon, a multi-disciplining approach is taken, applying the known from marketing, information systems, psychology, and computer science. 

Bases on a review of past and current research on online consumer behavior, a unified framework is proposed.  The framework is centered on the concept of shopping experience (SE), which is defined as the episodes of interaction between customer and shops.  Applied to online environment, online shopping experience (OSE) is the interactions between customers and web commercial site.  A shopping experience can be described by a set of attributes, including duration, breadth, depth, and intensity.  Also, shopping is a complex and dynamic activity.  Thus, a shopping experience consists of a range of sub-activities, including behavioral activities, cognitive activities, affective activities, and in-progress responses.  A shopping experience is situated among influential factors, such as store/site, shopper, product/task, and so on.  A shopping experience also produces outcomes, which in turn affect a shopper’ future behavior as part of past experience. 

We examine the nature and attributes of a shopping experience in online environment, the factors influencing the experience, and outcomes of the experience.  Since Shopping Experience (SE) is a newly defined concept, studies conducted so far are exploratory in nature as an effort to verify the concept and to further refine its definition and structure if needed in online environment.  A protocol analysis approach with concurrent verbalization was used to closely observe consumer behavior and explore the components of online SE.  Subjects were asked to verbalize their thought when interacting with an online retailing store to complete a shopping task.  These verbal protocols have been coded and categorized.  Preliminary results showed the usefulness of SE concept to understand online consumer behavior. 

A design for further investigation will be presented.  In this model, flow experience is the focus as the optimal shopping experience.  We are going to examine flow experience, its antecedents and effects via a series of studies.

2. Exploring the Impact of Industry Structure on the Emergence of E-marketplaces

Weijun Zheng

University of Oklahoma

wjzheng@ou.edu

The emergence of e-marketplaces is a tremendous phenomenon across nearly all industry in the beginning of 21ths century. As a population of strategic IT initiative, e-marketplaces interact with their surrounding industry structures to win their competitive advantages. In this research, the impact of industry structure on e-marketplaces is investigated through two channels: the roles e-marketplaces play and the linkages e-marketplaces own. The research propose that to be successful, e-marketplaces needs to take appropriate business and governance models to reflect the request from existing industry structures of their roles and linkages. The interaction between three industry structure and four types of EMs’ business model and two dimensions of EMs’ governance model will lead to different fitness and effectiveness of e-marketplaces roles and linkages.

3. Pricing Of Digital Content – An Experimental Evaluation Of Firm Strategies When Consumers Maintain Mental Accounts

Ranjan Dutta,

University of Texas

ranjand@mail.utexas.edu

The paper studies firm’s pricing strategies for selling information products like digital content and how these strategies interact with consumer behavior. Unlike traditional products, distribution of digital content allows content providers to embrace new pricing mechanisms. Currently, a gap exists between a firm’s decision to implement a pricing mechanism and the firm’s consideration of consumers’ behavior towards acceptance of that pricing mechanism. What can firms do to better align their revenue models with consumers’ behavioral norms? This paper examines implications of one of the many types of consumer’s economic anomalies: mental accounting (MA). MA can be described as a set of cognitive operations used by individuals to organize, evaluate and keep track of their financial activities.

We investigate how consumer level mental accounting of payment and consumption of digital content impacts firm level choices of pricing schemes. Three pricing schemes are considered – pre-payment, pay-per-use and post-payment. Traditional microeconomic theories predict that firms will be equally well-off from employing any of the above pricing schemes if revenue streams from each scheme are properly discounted. However, our analytical results show that when consumers maintain mental accounts, choice of pricing scheme does matter to digital content providers in a competitive market. The impact is magnified even more when level of customization is a further differentiating factor. We show that in a market exhibiting MA characteristics, content providers are better-off with pre-payment strategies if the customization level of their content offerings is highly differentiated. Otherwise, a firm which has lower customization level can choose between any of the three pricing schemes.

Adopting an experimental economics perspective, this paper empirically evaluates the validity of these analytical results. More specifically, we investigate whether the same analytically predicted NEs occur when real people play the game posing as firm level decision-makers. The results will offer insights into the choice of pricing schemes by content providers and may provide an explanation as to how economic and behavioral aspects of digital consumption interact with one another.        

1. Alignment of Technology and Organization in Telemedicine

Liqiong Deng

Marshall Scott Poole

Texas A&M University

jdeng@cgsb.tamu.edu

Health care organizations and professionals are among those that have increasingly taken advantage of information and communication technologies. Telemedicine, the use of electronic information and communication technologies to provide and support health care services when distance separates the participants (Institute of Medicine, 1996), have proliferated in recent years. However, telemedicine applications are still under-utilized (Tanriverdi & Iacono, 1999). While some important issues, such as medical liability, reimbursement and legal uncertainty in telemedicine, coupled with technical and economic problems, constitute the barriers to the implementation of telemedicine applications; the complex and dynamic implementation process of telemedicine, which involves interactions between organization and IT, poses the greatest challenges for a successful deployment of telemedicine. So, a good understanding of the implementation process of telemedicine is critical to realize full benefits of telemedicine.

This study will investigate the implementation and use of telemedicine as a dynamic process in which technology and organization are brought into alignment. Leonard-Barton’s alignment model of information technology implementation is employed as the base model for this study. We conceptualize telemedicine network as a socio-technical network consisting four elements: technical system, health care organization, customer, and personnel. Recognizing that telemedicine network is an open system whose development can be facilitated or constrained by the external environments it resides in, we also incorporates the effects of the external environment in our model. We propose that the implementation of telemedicine is an infinite process that continuously brings thesefive elements (both internal and external) into alignment.

2. Achievement of Psychomotor Skills Through Computer Supported Collaborative Learning requiring Immersive Presence (CSCLIP)

Joyce Lucca

Oklahoma State University

ljoyce@okstate.edu

The dramatic increase in Distance Learning (DL) in training and higher education is likely to continue.  Increasingly it is recognized that to be effective, on-line DL courses cannot simply replicate classroom instruction.  While a number DL studies focus on the acquisition of cognitive skills, only a few focus on the affective domain.  Research on DL that includes psychomotor, cognitive, and affective skills is however virtually non-existent.  Laboratory (lab) coursework, which we define to include learning of psychomotor, cognitive, and affective skills, has become a limiting factor in the growth of DL.  eLearning environments have previously been used to train operators of various kinds of equipment, where initial training in a virtual environment can avoid the expense, danger, and problems of monitoring and control associated with training in real life situations.  While these systems show great promise for saving time and money, they have been largely untested to make certain they are technically feasible and that the desired skills transfer to real world situations.

The objective of this study is to test an eLearning environment in a telecom domain that enables the development of psychomotor skills in a distributed environment.  In this research, we employed a basic treatment – control/postmeasure lab study to investigate if skills learned in a distributed environment can be transferred to a similar real world lab.  The control group completed the task of configuring a small Local Area Network (LAN) in a face-to-face environment.  The treatment group configured a LAN with some students working as local students and others from a remote location.  Subjects in the treatment group communicated through desktop videoconferencing and used virtual reality cabling software.  Each subject returned to the lab one week later to complete the task individually.  Subjects were measured for cognitive outcomes (test score), affective outcomes (group and individual satisfaction), and psychomotor outcomes (efficiency and effectiveness).  Preliminary findings are presented.

PANEL SESSIONS

	Sunday April 6 9:00 – 10:30 am CITD Room 108 Panel Session for PhD Students

 

Panel Members

Cynthia Beath, University of Texas

Dorothy Leidner, Baylor University 

Prem Premkumar, Iowa State University 

Rathindra Sarathy, Oklahoma State University 

Bob Zmud, University of Oklahoma