IS Decision Making Under Ambiguity

Decision situations are usually classified as decisions under certainty or uncertainty (risk) and considerable normative literature is available for guiding such decisions. Decision making under ambiguity, where ambiguity is operationalized as a “second order probability” or as a range of outcomes whose support may be unclear, is significantly different from risk and is receiving increasing attention in research. Most IS decisions, where little information is available about costs and benefits of alternatives are best characterized as decisions under ambiguity. In this paper, we focus on the decision strategies/heuristics adopted by decision makers when a) cost information, and, b) benefit information of IT investments are ambiguous. In an ambiguous situation, decision makers are known to either prefer unambiguous alternatives over ambiguous alternatives (ambiguity avoidance) or discount ambiguity completely (ambiguity discounting) and treat outcomes as certain, based on context factors. We generate several hypotheses for the cases of decision making in dyads as well as a general business settings relevant to IS decisions

Consumer Perceptions of Online Transaction Security - A Cognitive Explanation of the Origins of Perception

An important impediment to the success of business to consumer ecommerce is the consumer perception regarding the riskiness of the online channel. A widely held perception among consumers is that financial transactions on the Internet are inherently more risky and not secure. Interestingly enough, most security experts would view Internet transaction as, in fact, more secure than traditional transactions. The persistence of this misperception is therefore, quite surprising. In this research, we focus on consumers’ perceptions of online risks. We suggest that the consumer risk perceptions also arise from some well-known cognitive biases that decision-makers (consumers) are typically subject to. Taking an information processing view of customer decision making, we provide a subset of cognitive biases, which affect consumer judgments in information acquisition, alternative valuation and learning from evidence. Theoretical and limited experimental evidence is provided

A Study of Ecommerce Risk Perceptions among B2C Consumers: A Two Country Study

The ecommerce environment is fairly new, and several risks associated with it are novel to consumers. Consequently, e-consumers may not have developed an appropriate mental picture (i.e., a schema or a perceptual map) of these risks. For example, identity theft, a serious risk that became prominent after ecommerce has become popular, is still not well understood by most consumers. Thus, it is not clear how consumers participating in ecommerce perceive the risks. Existing ecommerce studies do not focus on risk per se; instead, they use very general constructs and measures of risk derived from general psychology and management studies in contexts other than ecommerce. Implicit in these studies is the assumption that the dimensions of perceived risk in ecommerce context are well understood. In this study, we use the psychometric paradigm to investigate how consumers organize novel online risks in memory. Data collected from consumers in two countries and analyzed using Multidimensional Scaling techniques shows significant differences in how consumers organize risks in their memory. This study is still in progress and preliminary analysis is presented

AFFECT AND RISKS IN IS RESEARCH

Affect and reliance on affect in making decisions under risk (affect heuristic) are important and distinct concepts that have received virtually no attention in the study of IS/ecommerce risk assessment. Affect in response to a risky stimulus is automatic and precedes all judgments/decisions. When processing of information is difficult, due to ambiguity or stimulus novelty, people might substitute a readily available evaluation (affect) for deliberation. When affect results in a strong positive/negative feeling state, people report benefits and costs, which are congruent with affect - thus, there is a possibility that privacy calculus and similar trade-off models may be artifacts of ignoring affect, rather than genuine phenomena. Finally, the concept of affect directs attention to the affective evaluability of attributes of stimulus as a key step in measuring, understanding and communicating risk. We are in the process of developing a model of risk which incorporates affective considerations for IS/Ecommerce research

Formal Employment and Organized Crime: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Colombia

Canonical models of crime emphasize economic incentives. Yet, causal evidence of sorting into criminal occupations in response to individual-level variation in incentives is limited. We link administrative socioeconomic microdata with the universe of arrests in Medellín over a decade. We exploit exogenous variation in formal-sector employment around a socioeconomic-score cutoff, below which individuals receive benefits if not formally employed, to test whether a higher cost to formal-sector employment induces crime. Regression discontinuity estimates show this policy generated reductions in formal-sector employment and a corresponding spike in organized crime, but no effects on crimes of impulse or opportunity

The AFLOW Fleet for Materials Discovery

The traditional paradigm for materials discovery has been recently expanded to incorporate substantial data driven research. With the intent to accelerate the development and the deployment of new technologies, the AFLOW Fleet for computational materials design automates high-throughput first principles calculations, and provides tools for data verification and dissemination for a broad community of users. AFLOW incorporates different computational modules to robustly determine thermodynamic stability, electronic band structures, vibrational dispersions, thermo-mechanical properties and more. The AFLOW data repository is publicly accessible online at aflow.org, with more than 1.7 million materials entries and a panoply of queryable computed properties. Tools to programmatically search and process the data, as well as to perform online machine learning predictions, are also available.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

Early life circumstance and adult mental health

We show that psychological well-being in adulthood varies substantially with circumstance in early life. Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we find that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early life decreases the likelihood of severe mental distress in adulthood by 3 percentage points (or half the mean prevalence) for cohorts born in cocoa-producing regions relative to those born in other regions. Impacts on related personality traits are consistent with this result. Maternal nutrition, reinforcing childhood investments, and adult circumstances are operative channels of impact

Affect and Online Privacy Concerns

Privacy risks are pervasive and while considerable work is available on cognitive aspects of privacy concern, very little is known about the emotional/affective aspect of privacy risk. Recent experimental evidence, suggests that contextual cues, rather than deliberate evaluation of costs and benefits of privacy, affect people’s privacy behaviors. This finding raises fundamental questions about the role of privacy concern in theory, the measurement of privacy concern and also in its utility in explaining privacy behavior in real-life decisions. Affect, a “faint whisper of emotion” which occurs automatically in any evaluation of risk and influences risk perception and evaluation, has received lot of attention in the literature. In this research, we examine the relative role of affect and cognition on people’s judgments of privacy risk. An experiment is proposed