Cost-Benefit Sharing in Cross-Company RFID Applications: A Case Study Approach

Although the highest potential for RFID in logistics is expected to be realized in cross-company applications, the status quo in the RFID project landscape is dominated by isolated solutions in specific fields. Reasons for this phenomenon are the high investment costs and the difficulty in assessing the benefits during the run-up phase. In network technologies such as RFID, the benefits depend on the spread of the technology in the network. A high discrepancy may result between the occurring costs and the resulting benefits for each of the network partners. This unequal distribution puts the success of the application at risk. To counter this trend, a balancing of costs and benefits should be considered. The research question of this paper is how these costs and benefits should be distributed among which participants. To develop a practical, relevant solution, we use an empirical research method based on an exploratory case study

On the usage of theories in the field of Wirtschaftsinformatik : a quantitative literature analysis

The development of theories is a central goal of every scientific discipline. Hence, theory development is also of considerable importance to the field of Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI), which seeks to progress as a scientific discipline. WI is the discipline focussing on research and design of information systems conducted by the German-speaking community. WI has slightly different objectives, focusses on different methods and different desired results compared to the Anglo-American Information Systems (IS) research discipline. Although both disciplines deal with information systems as their main research object, Mertens et al. (2014) propose to consider both disciplines as halfsister disciplines (in German: Halbschwesterdisziplinen). Against the background of the growing importance of theory development in WI, a lot of WI research contributions use and reference existing theories and theoretical models for different purposes, e.g. to derive and test hypotheses or to justify design decisions in the context of information systems’ design and development. Often, these theories originate from related scientific disciplines like economics or psychology. However, as it is still not clear which theories are of particular importance to WI research, this report aims at presenting a detailed analysis of the current usage of theories in WI and addresses the following research questions: Which theories are used in WI research and where do they originate from? and How has the usage of theories developed over time? These questions were examined based on a systematic analysis of a broad amount of scientific literature. Thus, this report is supposed to make a contribution to the ongoing discussion on the theoretical foundations of WI. Our analysis shows that 1,160 WI articles from 2000 to 2011 do, in large part, reference the same theories as Anglo-American Information Systems (IS) research. These findings are discussed and implications are highlighted