In this study we investigate whether social reference systems, such as Facebook ÒlikesÓ (FBLs), promote sales in social commerce, wherein adverse selection and quality uncertainty often severely damage consumer trust and impede efforts to achieve sustainable growth. We also examine the extent to which product characteristics (product uncertainty and product franchising) and deal characteristics (tipping points, discount rates, and deal durations) moderate the social selling stimulated by FBLs. On the basis of 1,327 samples collected from a major social commerce platform provider, we identify several interesting empirical regularities regarding the relationship between FBLs and social commerce sales. The findings suggest that FBLs drive traffic and increase sales. Information technology artifacts and social technologies, such as FBLs, can endow a consumer's shopping experience with a socialization component and induce social selling in collective buying platforms. Nevertheless, significant variations occur across products and deals. For example, consumers who purchase experience goods more frequently depend on FBLs than do those who buy search goods. FBLs exert a far greater influence on the sales of goods from independent stores than those from franchise chains. Social commerce consumers are unaffected by heavy discount rates as they make purchase decisions, but they extensively rely on FBLs, particularly when purchasing products that have low tipping points. Our results suggest that social commerce can be a powerful marketplace when the economic utility that is driven by price incentives is further strengthened and protected by the social utility that originates from trust and sharing. > >
This research paper analyzes the impact of information technology (IT) in a healthcare setting using a longitudinal sample of hospital data from 1976 to 1994. We classify production inputs into labor and capital categories. Capital is classified into three components-medical IT capital, medical capital, and IT capital-and labor is classified into two components, medical labor and IT labor. Results provide evidence that IT contributes positively to the production of services in the healthcare industry.
The influence of information technology (IT) investments on organizational performance is revisited. Bounded rationality, organizational controls, and political forces may constrain optimal selection of inputs and appropriate substitution between inputs. For example, firms may not be able to attain an optimal level of IT by substituting IT for labor (for reasons such as pressure from the labor union). Besides estimating a link between IT investments and firm output, this paper presents a study of the link between IT investment levels and the efficiency of processes.
Although electronic data interchange (EDI) holds the promise of significantly increasing the efficiency of business transactions, an installed base of proprietary implementations has been detrimental to the widespread acceptance of the technology. Thus, an important research issue involves strategies for facilitating EDT adoption. We analyze the introduction of an EDI system in a vertical market involving one manufacturer and two suppliers. The manufacturer initiates an EDT network, and penalizes a supplier for not joining the system by reducing its volume of business with the supplier. Along with a "stick," the manufacturer can also use a "carrot" in the form of a subsidy to partially offset a supplier's setup cost. The competition between the suppliers is characterized by incentive types for joining the EDT system ("motivating" or "threatening") and the Information Technology (IT) efficiency ("efficient" or "inefficient"). We show that regardless of its cost structure, a supplier may have to join the EDT network out of "strategic necessity," due to the presence of an IT-efficient supplier. Our analysis further shows that depending on the supplier competition structure, the EDT system may prove to be a "beneficial" strategic necessity for a large supplier and an "unfortunate" strategic necessity for a small supplier. Another key result is that by increasing the severity of the penalty. both the manufacturer and the follower supplier can be worse off under certain conditions. The analysis of subsidy strategies reveals that unless leadership and followership positions are reversed due to a subsidy, subsidizing a supplier has no impact on the joining time of its competitor. Thus the EDI initiator cannot induce both suppliers to join earlier by subsidizing one supplier. Also, the larger the slack capacity of the leader, the higher (lower) the manufacturer's incentive to subsidize the leader (follower). These results offer insights for initiators and adopters regarding penalty and subsidy strategies, impact on competition structure, joining decisions and network growth.
The lack of theories and methodological weakness have been pointed out as two distinct but related problems in empirical management information systems (MIS) research. Reinforcing the existing belief that too much attention has been devoted to "what" as opposed to "why" or "when" relationships exist, this paper focuses on a subset of model building and methodology issues involving the systematic discovery and representation of causal relationships. Our analysis of the existing empirical MIS literature reveals the need to build richer causal models, to increase the flexibility of model representation, to integrate the isolated worlds of pure latent and pure manifested variables, and to provide a tighter linkage between the exploratory and confirmatory research phases. Based on philosophy of science and advances in the fields of experimental economics and sociology, we propose a foundation for developing richer models by explicitly considering the exogeneity and endogeneity of constructs and a manipulative account of causality, and by recognizing the role of incentives, agent, and organizational characteristics in MIS models. Since richer models require more flexible tools and techniques, the paper describes the representational shortcomings and statistical pitfalls of factor-analytic methods commonly deployed in empirical research. We suggest that weak exploratory phase tools and approaches may allow violations of causal assumptions to pass undetected to the confirmatory phase. Since confirmatory tools like LISREL also make factor-analytic assumptions, these violations are not likely to be detected at the confirmatory phase either. We propose using TETRAD, a non-parametric tool, at the exploratory phase for its ability to accommodate a wide variety of causal models. The findings are summarized within an integrated framework, which enhances the likelihood of discovering relationships through richer theoretical support and powerful exploratory analysis.