Modeling and Simulation as Boundary Objects to Facilitate Interdisciplinary Research

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/150614/1/sres2564.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/150614/2/sres2564_am.pd

Full Information Product Pricing: An Information Strategy for Harnessing Consumer Choice to Create a More Sustainable World

Research and practice in the information systems (IS) field have been evolving over time, nourishing and promoting the development of applications that transform the relationships of individuals, corporations, and governments. Building on this evolution, we push forward a vision of the potential influence of the IS field into one of the most important problems of our times, an increasingly unsustainable world, which is traditionally considered the product of imperfect markets or market externalities. We describe our work in Full Information Product Pricing (FIPP) and our vision of a FIPP global socio-technical system, I-Choose, as a way to connect consumer choice and values with environmental, social, and economic effects of production and distribution practices. FIPP and I-Choose represent a vision about how information systems research can contribute to interdisciplinary research in supply chains, governance, and market economies to provide consumers with information packages that help them better understand how, where, and by whom the products they buy are produced. We believe that such a system will have important implications for international trade and agreements, for public policy, and for making a more sustainable world

Building a Certification and Inspection Data Infrastructure to Promote Transparent Markets

This article reports on data architecture that reduces information asymmetries to support public-private collaboration to govern product certification and inspection for promoting transparent markets and building consumer trust. The data architecture is a proof-of-concept set of data standards called the Certification and Inspection Data Infrastructure Building Block (CIDIBB) for data storage, retrieval, sharing and automated reasoning of data that can be used to respond the question: what constitutes a trustworthy certification and inspection process? CIDIBB consists of three interrelated ontologies, focusing specifically on certified fair-trade coffee that has the potential to become universally applicable to any certification and inspection process for products or services. The evaluation results suggest that CIDIBB is able to test the trustworthiness of certification schemes, providing consistent results. CIDIBB will contribute to support public-private collaboration to solve public problems such as the promotion of sustainable production and fair labor practices

Using Ontologies to Develop and Test a Certification and Inspection Data Infrastructure Building Block

Global markets for information-intensive products contain sharp information asymmetries that lead to market inefficiencies resulting from consumer purchasing decisions that are based on incomplete information. Elimination or reduction of such information asymmetries has long been the goal of governments as well as various nongovernmental entities that recognize that addressing issues such as sustainable production, socially just labor practices, and reduction in energy needs and health expenditure is closely linked to consumers being fully aware of the economic, environmental, and social impacts of their purchasing decisions. This chapter reports on the creation of ontology-enabled interoperable data infrastructure based on semantic technologies that would enable information sharing in traditionally information-restricted markets. The main technical result is a proof-of-concept set of data standards built on semantic technology applications and the functionalities of formal ontology of certification and inspection processes. The current proof of concept focuses specifically on certified fair-trade coffee, and while its applicability is currently limited, it has the potential to become universally applicable to any certification and inspection process for any product and service. In addition to producing a number of artifacts relevant to the expandability of the work, such as domain ontologies, the research indicates that while big data systems are necessary, they are not sufficient to create high levels of consumer trust. By testing the criteria using both hand-generated and automated queries, we are able to demonstrate that CIDIBB (Certification and Inspection Data Infrastructure Building Block) is not only able to test the trustworthiness of certification schemes but also that our ontology generates consistent results

Information strategies to support full information product pricing: The role of trust

In this paper we report on the importance of trust in the development and operation of distribution networks that attach non-price information to products to mitigate market dynamics introduced by information asymmetries. Often this non-price information is transmitted from producers to consumers through trusting networks or under certifiable labels such as organic or Fair Trade. We are calling such networks Full Information Product Pricing (FIPP) Networks. This study is part of a larger project aimed at understanding how a suite of future-possible data interoperability standards and social computing technologies will set the stage for a set of product labelings, information architectures and policies that may have the potential to supplement a compliance-enforcement approach with a more market-based voluntary approach to significantly expand the share of worker- and environmentally- friendly products within the NAFTA region. This initial exploration of four cases in Canada and Latin America indicated that trust, in the forms of institutional trust, calculative trust, and relational trust, plays key roles in FIPP operations and expansion. It is critical for building collaboration, coordinating network activities, and mitigating the risks associated with information asymmetry. © 2013 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved

Challenges and requirements for developing data architecture supporting integration of sustainable supply chains

Information asymmetry between consumers and supply chain actors represents a major barrier to the expansion of sustainable consumption. Developing an interoperable data architecture that enables the integration of data regarding sustainability practices from disparate sources in sustainable supply chains is important for improving market transparency. This paper identifies main issues and requirements as perceived by the key stakeholders in the coffee supply chain for such development. The analysis reveals that building an interoperable data architecture necessitates awareness of several major challenges, including the difficulties of collecting accurate and creditable data, limited technological capabilities, complex data ownership and disclosure policy, issues of confidentiality, privacy and economic value of information, and cost of disclosing information. To deal with these challenges, we recommend that the development need to ensure data quality, integrity and security, design information policy balancing commercial interests and openness, and design appropriate governance mechanism to complement the technological design in order to ensure the fair and proper use of the system