Questions pertaining to the locus of information systems (IS) governance have been extensively examined in existing research. However, questions pertaining to the decision rationale applied for IS portfolio prioritization (why are certain initiatives approved, and why are certain others rejected), noted to be a critical component of IS governance, need further investigation. We submit that the IS strategy of a firm is likely to explain the decision rationale it applies to IS portfolio prioritization and maintain that it is critical to ensure this decision rationale is in congruence with the firm's IS strategy. By extending prior theoretical work on IS strategy types, we develop theoretical profiles of the decision rationale applied to IS portfolio prioritization using three attributes: communicability of decision rationale, consistency in applying decision rationale, and risk appropriateness of decision rationale. Since the decision rationale applied for IS portfolio prioritization is often tacit, unknown even to the decision makers themselves, we employ the decision tree induction methodology to discover this tacit decision rationale. We analyze over 150 IS portfolio prioritization decisions on a multimillion dollar IS portfolio of a multibusiness, Fortune 50 firm and our findings, which support our propositions, indicate that firms that adopt different IS strategies rely on systematically different profiles of decision rationale for IS portfolio prioritization. Implications for IS governance practices are developed.
E-business standards are a key infrastructure for electronic commerce. In many industries, they are collaboratively developed by firms in an open and neutral industry consortium. It is imperative to understand what drives firms' resource investments in such consortia, as they are critical for the success of e-business standardization. Based on collective action theory, we propose a research model to investigate the drivers of standard development within consortia. We test the model through a data set of 232 firms from 7 consortia. Consistent with collective action theory, our results demonstrate that firms' interests, resource availability, and consortium management effectiveness jointly determine their resource expenditures within the consortium. However, our exploratory investigation indicates differences between vendors and users, as vendors are more motivated by perceived standard benefits whereas users are more motivated by perceived process benefits. Our research provides a deeper understanding of firms' behaviors within consortia and factors driving their standard making.
E-business standards are critical for electronic interorganizational transactions. In many industries, firms develop e-business standards collaboratively in a standard consortium. They can choose to become a leading developer, a passive adopter, or a nonadopter. To capture firms' strategic choices at the development stage and the adoption stage, which are related due to the double-sided interactions between the two stages, we propose an integrated model of consortium-based e-business standardization. We find that firms' payoffs from standard adoption increase with the intrinsic value of the standard, but developers' benefits increase faster than passive adopters' benefits. The model examines the value of passive adopters to the standard development via network externalities, even though passive adopters do not contribute directly in the consortium. We find that passive adopters do not always exist. There are two possible equilibria for the endogenous formation of the developer network and the adopter network, one without passive adopters and one with passive adopters. How external conditions affect the endogenous formation of the consortium depends upon whether there are passive adopters in the equilibrium. Based on our analysis, we recommend strategies to e-business standard consortia to motivate firms' participation and enhance social welfare created by the standard.
The Internet offers several tools such as shopping bots and search engines that help potential buyers search for lower prices. This paper defines buyers' online search strategy as using one or more of these tools to search for lower prices, and empirically investigates the validity of economics of information search theory in explaining buyers' choice of a particular online search strategy. We find that buyers' attitudes toward the price offered by their preferred online seller, their perception of online price dispersion, and their awareness of shopping agents have a significant effect on their choice of online search strategy. An understanding of buyers' choice of online search strategies can help an online seller to estimate its expected probability of making an online sale, optimize its online pricing, and improve its online promotional and advertising activities.
This report is concerned with a rule learning system called the Distributed Learning System (DLS). Its objective is two-fold: First, as the main contribution, the DLS as a rule-earning technique is described and the resulting computational performance is presented, with definitive computational benefits clearly demonstrated to show the efficacy of using the DLS. Second, the important parameters of the DLS are identified to show the characteristics of the Group Problem Solving (GPS) strategy as implemented in the DLS. On one hand this helps us pinpoint the critical designs of the DLS for effective rule learning; on the other hand this analysis can provide insight into the use of GPS as a more general rule-learning strategy.