The Roles of Corporate IT Infastructure and their Impact on IS Effectiveness

In the strategic alignment model of Henderson and Venkatraman (1993) [1] IT infrastructure has an important but only implicitly defined role. According to evolving literature, IT infrastructure serves many different purposes in large companies. We outline the main missions (roles) of the corporate-wide IT infrastructure and its contribution to IS effectiveness and study the relationship of IT infrastructure with alignment processes and strategic integration. Our empirical tests with data from almost one hundred large companies resulted in three IT infrastructure roles, which reflect the IS communality, strategic, and flexibility dimensions of the corporate-wide IT infrastructure. The roles were not symmetrically related to the IS effectiveness and alignment perspectives. IT infrastructure roles had a significant interplay with strategic integration in improving IS effectiveness. However, the interplay of IT infrastructure roles with alignment perspectives had only marginal effects. Implications of the results for research and practice are discussed

Local energy trading for microgrids:Modeling human behavior, uncertainty and grid constraints

Electricity is one of the major drivers of today’s society and its rapid development, however, it also significantly contributes to the ongoing global warming. To reduce its impact, the energy transition aims to change the electricity production by switching from fossil fuels to more renewable and sustainable energy sources. In adition, the energy transition also addresses required changes in the heating and mobility sector.These changes have a significant impact on the electricity system, and an intelligent (active) management of the electricity production and consumption is required. Throughout the last years, many approaches have been proposed to manage production and consumption. At the core of this thesis, we focus on three different aspects of such approaches.1: We consider and analyze the impact of human behavior on the outcome of a local electricity market. Due to the direct participation of households, the question arises how human preferences and behavior affect the outcome of the market. Therefore, we translate a behavioral model from social science into a multi-objective optimization problem, which uses the personal preferences and motives of households and creates tailor-made bidcurves. We analyze the results on an household and the market level to derive implications for future maket design.2: The shift in electricity production leads to increased uncertainties in the future energy system. To deal with such uncertainties, we focus on a joint energy management of a neighborhood. We apply ideas and techniques from robust optimization to deal with the uncertainty, and mainly focus on an approach combining static robust optimization with a rolling horizon framework. Hereby, we generalize the rolling horizon by allowing more flexible starting time slots and compare and analyze two such generalized rolling horizon versions.3: The increased peaks due to the additional production and generation pose a serious burden to the current electricity grid. To ensure a safe operation, we focus on grid constraints in the context of a real-time control approach, which implements day-ahead and intraday market solutions. We use the planned solutions to guide the real-time decisions, and identify an interesting connection between day-ahead operations and their real-time realization

What's a face worth: Noneconomic factors in game playing

Where behavior defies economic analysis, one explanation is that individuals consider more than the immediate payoff. We present evidence that noneconomic factors influence behavior. Attractiveness influences offers in the Ultimatum and Dictator Games. Facial resemblance, a cue of relatedness, increases trusting in a two-node trust game. Only by considering the range of possible influences will game-playing behavior be explained