How Unbecoming of You: Gender Biases in Perceptions of Ridesharing Performance

It has been suggested that the gig-economy’s elimination of traditional arm’s-length transactions may introduce bias into perceptions of quality. In this work, we build upon research that has identified biases based on ascriptive characteristics in rating systems, and examine gender biases in ridesharing platforms. In doing so, we extend research to consider not simply willingness to transact, but post transaction perceptions of quality. We also examine which types of tasks may yield more biased ratings for female drivers. We find no differences in ratings across gender in the presence of a high quality experience. However, when there is a lower quality experience, penalties for women accrue faster, notably when poorly performed tasks are perceived to be highly gendered

A Tutorial on Empirical ICT4D Research in Developing Countries: Processes, Challenges, and Lessons

Humanitarian operations research holds a considerable allure for researchers, often promising interesting contexts to develop and extend current theory, large pools of data to validate theory and generate new insights, and, more generally, the opportunity to conduct “research that matters”. For many of these reasons, we embarked on several research initiatives over the past several years with mixed results. In this tutorial, we draw on several studies (some abandoned) to explore the use of information and communication technologies for humanitarian purposes, and we synthesize and highlight the distinct features of humanitarian operations research. Specifically, we draw attention to differences between “the process” of conducting these studies relative to traditional research and focus on challenges and opportunities for researchers

Uninformed Consent: The Benefits and Limits of Transparency and Choice in Privacy Decision Making

<p>Solutions to privacy concerns centered on notifying consumers about (transparency), and granting them control over the collection and use of their personal information (choice) are pervasive. Policy makers posit that these measures will aid consumers in improved privacy decision making. Conversely, scholars argue that these protections may have a negative impact on market efficiency and firm technology innovation and adoption. Chapter 2 evaluates the impact of regulation providing consumers transparency and choice on technology adoption by hospitals and finds, in contrast to prior results, evidence for a beneficial role of privacy regulation. I also find evidence that these gains may be a result of reduced barriers to adoption stemming from consumer privacy concerns. In Chapters 3 and 4 I shift my focus to evaluate the premise proposed by policy makers that increased transparency and choice will improve consumer privacy decision making. In Chapter 3, I first find that simple privacy notices communicating lower privacy decision making. I Chapter 3, I first find that simple privacy notices communication lower privacy protection can, under some conditions, result in less disclosure from participants, in-line with the policy aims for increased transparency. However, I also find that simple and common changes in those same notices, exploiting individual heuristics and biases, can result in the effect of even straightforward and accessible privacy notices being predictably manipulated (Experiment 1) or entirely thwarted (Experiment 2). Finally, in chapter 4 I find substantial malleability in individual privacy decision making in response to changes in choice framing. Specifically, the labeling of settings, the mix of setting relevance, and the presentation of choices as a choice to reject all impacted the decision frame for participants in a manner that significantly influenced participants' choice of privacy protective settings. Taken together, these results suggest that while privacy solutions centered on transparency and choice may alleviate barriers to technology adoption stemming from consumer privacy concerns, the implicit assumption that they will reduce consumer privacy risks may be questioned. Implications for policy makers include a persistence, and perhaps increase, in consumer privacy risks despite increased transparency and control. </p

Can a Hospital’s Analytics Capabilities Impact Patient Satisfaction? A Multi-Year Panel Study

An empirical link between organizational performance and the IT necessary to enable data analytics capabilities has not yet been established. Drawing from organization information processing theory (OIPT), which argues that uncertainty and equivocality negatively impact organizational performance, we construct a model in which performance-”measured as hospitals’ patient satisfaction-”is a function of clinical analytics capabilities, complexity, and concentration. Our argument is that clinical analytics is an uncertainty-reducing mechanism that directly impacts satisfaction. However, we propose a nuanced moderating role of complexity of patient cases and concentration (the mix of procedures performed in a hospital). We show that analytics capabilities increased patient satisfaction, but we also find evidence for the moderating role of complexity on the effect of analytics on satisfaction. The result for the moderating impact of concentration was not significant; however, our post-hoc analysis indicated that the moderating effect was present in larger hospitals

A Query-Theory Perspective of Privacy Decision Making

Long-standing policy approaches to privacy protection are centered on consumer notice and control and assume that privacy decision making is a deliberative process of comparison between costs and benefits from information disclosure. An emerging body of work, however, documents the powerful effects of factors unrelated to objective trade-offs in privacy settings. In this paper, we investigate how focusing on the process by which individuals make privacy choices can help explain the impact of rational and behavioral factors on privacy decision making. In an online experiment, we borrow from query-theory literature and measure individuals’ considerations (that is, queries) across manipulations of rational and behavioral factors. We find that effects of rational and behavioral factors are associated with differences in the order and valence of queries considered in privacy settings. Our results confirm that understanding how differences in privacy choice emerge can help harmonize disparate perspectives on privacy decision making

Beyond the Privacy Paradox: Objective Versus Relative Risk in Privacy Decision Making

Privacy decision making has been examined in the literature from alternative perspectives. A dominant normative perspective has focused on rational processes by which consumers with stable preferences for privacy weigh the expected benefits of privacy choices against their potential costs. More recently, a behavioral perspective has leveraged theories from decision research to construe privacy decision making as a process in which cognitive heuristics and biases predictably occur. In a series of experiments, we compare the predictive power of these two perspectives by evaluating the impact of changes in the objective risk of disclosure and the impact of changes in the relative perceptions of risk of disclosure on both hypothetical and actual consumer privacy choices. We find that both relative and objective risks can, in fact, influence consumer privacy decisions. However, and surprisingly, the impact of objective changes in risk diminishes between hypothetical and actual choice settings. Vice versa, the impact of relative risk becomes more pronounced going from hypothetical to actual choice settings. Our results suggest a way to integrate diverse streams of the information systems literature on privacy decision making: in hypothetical choice contexts, relative to actual choice contexts, consumers may both overestimate their response to normative factors and underestimate their response to behavioral factors

A Query-Theory Perspective of Privacy Decision Making

Long-standing policy approaches to privacy protection are centered on consumer notice and control and assume that privacy decision making is a deliberative process of comparison between costs and benefits from information disclosure. An emerging body of work, however, documents the powerful effects of factors unrelated to objective trade-offs in privacy settings. In this paper, we investigate how focusing on the process by which individuals make privacy choices can help explain the impact of rational and behavioral factors on privacy decision making. In an online experiment, we borrow from query-theory literature and measure individuals’ considerations (that is, queries) across manipulations of rational and behavioral factors. We find that effects of rational and behavioral factors are associated with differences in the order and valence of queries considered in privacy settings. Our results confirm that understanding how differences in privacy choice emerge can help harmonize disparate perspectives on privacy decision making