On transparency in organizations

Non-transparency both in the form of incomplete information disclosure and in the form of coarse feedback disclosure is optimal in virtual all organizational arrangements of interest. Speci�cally, in moral hazard interactions, some form of non-transparency is always desirable, as soon as the dimensionality of the problem exceeds the dimensionality of the action spaces of the various agents

Exploring the neural correlates of e-Assurance and multi-faced risk in e-Commerce

El comercio electrónico ha permitido a multitud de pequeñas empresas exponer sus productos y aumentar su público objetivo potencial. Pese a la relativa facilidad de introducirse en este mercado, la mayor dificultad estriba en eliminar las barreras que limitan a los consumidores comprar online. Una de las vías que poseen mayor potencial para aumentar la confianza online y reducir el riesgo percibido es dotar a su web de señales de confianza, entre las que destacan los certificados externos, ratings de consumidores y políticas de privacidad. Este estudio precisamente usa una técnica neurocientífica (resonancia magnética funcional) junto a cuestionarios con el propósito de esclarecer objetivamente el procesamiento neurológico de esas tres señales de seguridad online. Además, usando estas nuevas herramientas, pretende dilucidar la debatida dimensionalidad del riesgo percibido. Los resultados aconsejarán a comercios online la señal más útil a incluir en sus webs y se concretarán las dimensiones del riesgo percibido.E-commerce has allowed many small firms sell their products and broaden their target. Despite the relative ease in which vendors enter this marketplace, the strongest difficulty is to decrease barriers which discourage online purchases. One of the most useful ways to increase consumer online trust and reduce perceived risk is creating trust mechanisms in web sites, such as seals of approval, consumer ratings and privacy policies. Specifically, this study applies a neuroscientific tool (functional magnetic resonance imaging- fMRI-) together with questionnaires with the aim to clear up the neural processing of those trust signals (e-assurances). Furthermore, using fMRI, we explore the “under-debated” dimensionality of perceived risk. The findings will advise online retailers with the most useful e-assurance to include in their websites as well as will specify the dimensions of perceived risk

Reconceptualizing Online Self-Disclosure: Measure Development and Validation

The measurement of online self-disclosure faces three key problems: inconsistent conceptualization, varied dimensionality – which raises issues of incomplete contextualization to the online environment – and the breadth of instrumentation. Our study aims to address the first two issues by presenting a new instrument, including a short-form version to promote adoption in future research – thus addressing the third issue. We consider the contextualization of self-disclosure to online environments and find most of the traditional dimensions of self-disclosure (i.e. amount, depth, honesty, polarity, intent) are easily adapted except for intent. Because of key differences between online and in-person communications (i.e. reduced nonverbal cues, asynchronicity, editability, and varied audiences), our proposed instrument focuses on reconceptualizing how intent operates online; we do so by testing four context-specific dimensions influenced by the literature. Our proposed dimensions include: willingness to participate, conscientious use, audience control, and reciprocity. Willingness to participate represents the varying degree to which individuals are active in online communities. Conscientious use captures the degree to which individuals use the affordances of asynchronicity and editability when generating content and messages to share. Audience control accounts for context collapse – the convergence of various social groups into a single audience – in various online platforms and represents the degree to which individuals limit who sees the content they share online. Lastly, reciprocity has been used previously as a component of self-disclosure in qualitative studies and so we include it as the propensity to share personal information in response to another’s disclosure. Through the process of identifying new dimensions to replace intent, we determined there was potentially a new, underlying structure of the self-disclosure construct. The self-disclosure literature employs multiple structural definitions, from a unidimensional to a second-order – often formative – construct. Among the dimensions of self-disclosure, we identified two distinct groups of dimensions: message-specific (e.g. how long, frequent, intimate, positive or negative, and honest) and behavior-specific (e.g. actions to protect the information from unwanted audiences, the presence in certain communities, etc.). As part of our measure development process, we examine a new, third-order structural definition of online self-disclosure. The proposed instrument underwent two rounds of card sorting and a student pilot sample before we collected data from a sample on MTurk. That data collection included items from two existing, relatively popular measures from the information systems literature in addition to antecedents and consequents from self-disclosure’s nomological net. The analysis resulted in further changes to the instrument and will require another round of data collection for finalization

Nearest neighbor embedding with different time delays

A nearest neighbor based selection of time delays for phase space reconstruction is proposed and compared to the standard use of time delayed mutual information. The possibility of using different time delays for consecutive dimensions is considered. A case study of numerically generated solutions of the Lorenz system is used for illustration. The effect of contamination with various levels of additive Gaussian white noise is discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, updated to final versio