Designing IS service strategy: an information acceleration approach

Information technology-based innovation involves considerable risk that requires insight and foresight. Yet, our understanding of how managers develop the insight to support new breakthrough applications is limited and remains obscured by high levels of technical and market uncertainty. This paper applies a new experimental method based on “discrete choice analysis” and “information acceleration” to directly examine how decisions are made in a way that is behaviourally sound. The method is highly applicable to information systems researchers because it provides relative importance measures on a common scale, greater control over alternate explanations and stronger evidence of causality. The practical implications are that information acceleration reduces the levels of uncertainty and generates a more accurate rationale for IS service strategy decisions

Benefit transfers of cultural heritage values - how far can we go?

Assessing the economic values attached to alternative land uses, when cultural heritage goods are at stake, makes the valuation process more articulated. Economic elicitation of cultural heritage values is quite a recent practice. Not many case studies have applied non-market valuation techniques, such as contingent valuation methods or travel cost methods, to derive monetary estimates of cultural goods attribute and even fewer applications have been policy oriented. Being a relatively recent research field, the first applications have mainly dealt with the challenges faced by the valuation techniques and the validity and reliability of results. These studies, particularly contingent valuation ones, have very high implementation costs. Hence, to obtain primary estimates of cultural values, agencies need to spend a great deal of money and time. Since these resources are scarce, there is an impinging need to consider the possibility of transferring benefit estimates from a specific “study site” for which data has been collected, to a “policy site” for which there is little or no information. An important question often addressed in the literature is what we can learn from individual case studies for a next case study. How general are the results of case study research? Can we transfer findings from a set of rather similar case studies to a new case study? This question is known as the benefit transfer (or value transfer) issue and seeks to investigate under which (general and specific) conditions common findings from various case studies are more or less valid for a new given case at a distinct site. Knowledge acquisition in the social sciences, and hence also in economics, is usually based on a reductionist approach, which eliminates many person-specific, object-specific or site-specific characteristics of a phenomenon, but the major advantage is that it allows for generalization through a common standardized approach that is applicable to a larger population. This methodology lies also at the heart of meta-analysis, which seeks to synthesize research findings from different case studies (van den Bergh et al. 1997, van den Bergh and Button 1997, 1999). Through the use of common relevant descriptors (behavioural, methodological, contextual) it is possible to draw inferences from a large sample of cases. For value transfer (also commonly named ‘benefit transfer’) the possibility of using meta-analysis is of major importance (Bal and Nijkamp 1998a). The basic idea of value transfer is that knowledge accumulated over time may be subjected to a transfer to a new, similar type of study. For the use of knowledge on a new similar study, it would be ideal if almost identical site characteristics could be transferred without any manipulation and if, at the same time, typical site-unique characteristics could be taken into account: that is, if it were possible to adapt derived variables for these site-unique characteristics.Value transfer studies in cultural heritage economics are rather rare, and the idea itself is quite controversial. In this paper we offer a concise – and certainly not exhausting – review of some recent value transfer studies in this area, with a particular view to spatial variability and transferability. We discuss limits and potentialities of benefit transfer approach for cultural values, aiming to raise debate on the topic. We acknowledge the local nature of cultural values and the strict relationship with the population to which the specific heritage belongs, but we focus on the more universally shared values that are embedded in cultural heritage and on possible ways of expressing them in terms of priorities and clusters. More research is needed in this direction before dismissing the possibility to apply benefit transfer in the case of cultural values estimates.

A Meta-Analysis of the Willingness to Pay for Reductions in Pesticide Risk Exposure

The use of environmental policy instruments such as eco-labelling and pesticide taxes should preferably be based on disaggregate estimates of the individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for pesticide risk reductions. We review the empirical valuation literature dealing with pesticide risk exposure and develop a taxonomy of environmental and human health risks associated with pesticide usage. Subsequently, we use meta-analysis to investigate the variation in WTP estimates for reduced pesticide risk exposure. Our findings show that the WTP for reduced risk exposure is approximately 15% greater for medium, and 80% greater for high risk-levels, as compared to low risk levels. The income elasticity of pesticide risk exposure is generally positive, although not overly robust. Most results indicate that the demand for human health and environmental safety is highly elastic. We also show that geographical differences, characteristics of the survey, and the type safety device (eco-labelling, integrated management, or bans) are important drivers of the valuation results.Pesticide risk, Willingness to pay, Meta-analysis

Developing a theoretical framework of consumer logistics from a comprehensive literature review

Paper delivered at the 21st Logistics Research Network annual conference 2016, 7th-9th September 2016, Hull. Abstract Purpose: Logistics as a business discipline entered academic consciousness in the mid-1960s when work by marketing academics discussed the integration between marketing and logistics. However, the link with consumers in the point-of-origin to point-of-consumption typology was not explored until Granzin and Bahn’s conceptualisation and model of consumer logistics (CL) in 1989. Since then few contributions have followed and neglecting this aspect of logistics research is difficult to understand. Firstly, the consumer represents a productive resource as an important downstream supply chain member carrying out logistics activities and tasks. Secondly, logistics activities directed towards the consumer also act along a marketing axis, i.e. satisfaction and loyalty for an overall shopping experience both from transaction-specific and cumulative levels are influenced by product quality elements and service-related dimensions. This paper presents a theoretical framework for deeper research into the topic of CL. Research approach: A literature review was conducted first following philosophical or field conceptualization principles as a first step towards theory building. Data bases of major logistics and SCM journals were searched however the publication timeframe was not limited as the concept of CL is relatively new. Selection criteria and Boolean searches were conducted and keywords used within article abstracts and title fields of search. Due to a relative scarcity of contributions obtained by that approach and in-line with the principle of methodological triangulation, additional search strategies were applied using Google/ Google Scholar searches. The majority of the cited contributions were also cross-referenced and included in the analysis if appropriate. Findings and originality: The literature search yielded a mother population of 46 documents of which 24 have been considered relevant for further consideration. The document harvest was analysed using Granzin and Bahn’s original CL issues and additional features in order to explore, structure, articulate, orient, hierarchize and delimit the field of CL in the 21st century. Research impact: This paper updates Granzin and Bahn’s work to outline new and distinctive features of CL given the obvious changes in the retail landscape since their work 27 years ago, such as the Internet and omni-channel retailing. More broadly, conceptualizing CL in a holistic manner enhances SCM theory building by questioning traditional notions of time and space ranges, isolated marketing-merchandizing/logistics considerations, traditional understandings of sites /locations, and equipment (e.g. shopping cart or basket)/ infrastructure/ layout and buying stages that are in-line with external evolutions on organizational, technological and societal levels. Practical impact: Understanding and improving CL contributes to supply chain competitiveness via increased consumer satisfaction and loyalty, better order fulfilment via cost reductions and efficiency increases, and enhanced differentiation targeting consumers receptive for sustainability/ ethics/ mobility/ lifestyle/ life quality issues. A dedicated approach to CL also enhances management of repercussions and interactions with upstream/ B2B logistics, visible through retail stores being both a destination and a source for inventory, the rise of drop-ship vendor relationships and new fulfilment options and related infrastructure

A Meta-Analysis of the Willingness to Pay for Reductions in Pesticide Risk Exposure

The use of environmental policy instruments such as eco-labelling and pesticide taxes should preferably be based on disaggregate estimates of the individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) for pesticide risk reductions. We review the empirical valuation literature dealing with pesticide risk exposure and develop a taxonomy of environmental and human health risks associated with pesticide usage. Subsequently, we use meta-analysis to investigate the variation in WTP estimates for reduced pesticide risk exposure. Our findings show that the WTP for reduced risk exposure is approximately 15% greater for medium, and 80% greater for high risk-levels, as compared to low risk levels. The income elasticity of pesticide risk exposure is generally positive, although not overly robust. Most results indicate that the demand for human health and environmental safety is highly elastic. We also show that geographical differences, characteristics of the survey, and the type safety device (eco-labelling, integrated management, or bans) are important drivers of the valuation results.Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Modeling economic systems as locally-constructive sequential games

Real-world economies are open-ended dynamic systems consisting of heterogeneous interacting participants. Human participants are decision-makers who strategically take into account the past actions and potential future actions of other participants. All participants are forced to be locally constructive, meaning their actions at any given time must be based on their local states; and participant actions at any given time affect future local states. Taken together, these essential properties imply real-world economies are locally-constructive sequential games. This paper discusses a modeling approach, Agent-based Computational Economics, that permits researchers to study economic systems from this point of view. ACE modeling principles and objectives are first concisely presented and explained. The remainder of the paper then highlights challenging issues and edgier explorations that ACE researchers are currently pursuing

Mitigation factors

The debate over the costs of GHG emission reduction has become more com-plex recently as disagreements over the existence of economic and environ-mental double dividents have been added to discussions over the existence of a negative cost potential. We argue that basic assumptions about economic effi-ciency, the (sub-)optimality of the baseline and the rate of technical change are more important than model structure, and we underline the importance of the timing of decisions for determining the costs. Moreover the use of a single baseline ‘no policy' scenario and several policy intervention scenarios may be fundamentally misleading in the longer term simply because the very idea of a business as usual scenario is deeply problematic. Ultimately the debate turns on political judgments about the desirability of alternative development paths. Copright© 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.Greenhouse gas emissions;Costs of GHG reduction; Mitigation options

The state-of-the-art in personalized recommender systems for social networking

With the explosion of Web 2.0 application such as blogs, social and professional networks, and various other types of social media, the rich online information and various new sources of knowledge flood users and hence pose a great challenge in terms of information overload. It is critical to use intelligent agent software systems to assist users in finding the right information from an abundance of Web data. Recommender systems can help users deal with information overload problem efficiently by suggesting items (e.g., information and products) that match users’ personal interests. The recommender technology has been successfully employed in many applications such as recommending films, music, books, etc. The purpose of this report is to give an overview of existing technologies for building personalized recommender systems in social networking environment, to propose a research direction for addressing user profiling and cold start problems by exploiting user-generated content newly available in Web 2.0