Impact of Information Technology on Agricultural Commodity Auctions in India

Empirical research on the value of information technology investments in the information systems literature has primarily focused on the use of IT by businesses and multinational firms. The impact of IT on the global agricultural supply chain has largely been ignored in the IS literature. Auctions to buy and sell large volumes of agricultural commodities are widely prevalent in diverse regions of the world and are an important part of the agricultural supply chain. In an effort to increase efficiency, commodity auctions have been experimenting with online formats in recent years. Such online auctions have generated significant interest in the trade press because of their potential to generate higher commodity prices for producers, reduce unfair trading practices by middlemen, and bridge the digital divide. We analyze transaction data from a recently set up online auction in India that trades in various grades of coffee. We model the impact of lower transaction costs, daily operations, less collusive behavior among buyers, and learning curve effects on the selling price of coffee in the online auction. We estimate the parameters of the model by comparing the prices in the electronic auction with those of the same grade of coffee at physical auctions held weekly. We find that electronic auction prices are 4 percent higher and the difference is statistically significant. Further, we find that the price differential is higher for coffee grades that have higher price volatility and that are traded less frequently in the physical exchange. We also find that the price differential increases over time as buyers become more familiar with the benefits of the electronic trading format

In Search of Software Maintenance Productivity and Quality: Does Software Complexity Matter?

Over the past several decades, sof.twaremaintenance has heen absorbing a large and rising proportion of Information Systcmns (IS) resources wilh expenditures ofteu as high as 80% to 95% of the total IS budget (Nosek and Palvia 1990). On a life-cycle basis, about three-fourths of the investment in software occurs after the system bas been implemented. Thus, support for existing software represents il significant investment of resources for most f m s and there is considerable interest in understaiding and improving productivity and quality in the software maintenance w k

CASE STUDY OF ELECTRONIC BANKING AT MERIDIAN BANCORP

The paper illustrates âbusiness value linkage impact analysisâ, a new method for measuring the business value of information technology (IT), in the context of a case study of electronic banking operations at Meridian Bancorp, a large commercial bank. Management science models were constructed to gauge the impact of automated teller machines (ATMs) on branch teller labour productivity and retail deposit market share, and the potential for substitution of labour by ATMs is shown. Econometric estimation of the models yielded the following results: the efficiency of teller labour was found to decline in the presence of a branch ATM; a bank's ATM network decision was shown to be an important determinant of the relative size of the retail deposit market it could capture in south-east Pennsylvania; membership in the regionally dominant MAC ATM network leveraged retail deposit market share when a clear majority of local branches and ATMs were members of a regionally smaller, competing network: and high-density ATM deployment did not lead to increases in the overall size of the deposit market.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR AUTOMATING SOFTWARE METRICS IN OBJECT-ORIENTED COMPUTER AIDED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENTS

This paper makes the business case for automating the collection of software metrics for gauging development performance in integrated computer aided software engineering (CASE) environments that are characterized by an object-oriented development methodology and a centralized repository. The automation of function point analysis is discussed in the context of such an integrated CASE environment (ICE). We also discuss new metrics that describe three different dimensions of code reuse -- leverage, value and classification -- and examine the p,ossibility of utilizing objects as means to estimate software development labor and measure productivity. We argue that the automated collection of these software metrics opens up new avenues for refining the management of software development projects and controlling stra-egic costs.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

MEASURING THE DEVELOPMENT PERFORMANCE OF INTEGRATED COMPUTER AIDED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (I-CASE): A SYNTHESIS OF FIELD STUDY RESULTS FROM THE FIRST BOSTON CORPORATION

Information Systems Working Papers Serie

QUANTIFYING THE BUSINESS VALUE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND APPLICATION TO ELECTRONIC BANKING

Information Systems Working Papers Serie

AUTOMATED SOFTWARE METRICS, REPOSITORY EVALUATION AND SOFTWARE ASSET MANAGEMENT: NEW TOOLS AND PERSPECTIVES FOR MANAGING INTEGRATED COMPUTER AIDED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (I-CASE)

Automated collection of software metrics in computer aided software engineering (CASE) environments opens up new avenues for improving the management of software development operations, as well as shifting the focus of management's control efforts from "software projectâ to "software assets" stored in a centralized repository. Repository evaluation, a new direction for software metrics research in the 1990s, promises a fresh view of software development performance for a range of responsibility levels. We discuss the automation of function point and code reuse analysis in the context of an integrated CASE (I-CASE) environment deployed at a large investment bank in New York City. The development of an automated code reuse analysis tool prompted us to re-think how to measure and interpret code reuse in the I-CASE environment. The metrics we propose describe three dimensions of code reuse -- leverage, value and classification -- and we examine the value of applying them on a project and a repository-wide basis.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

FACTORS AFFECTING SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE PRODUCTIVITY: AN EXPLORATORY STUDYl

Systems developers and researchers have long been interested in the factors that affect software development productivity. Identification of factors as either aiding or hindering productivity enables management to take steps to encourage the positive influences and to eliminate the negative ones. This research has explored the possibility of developing an estimable model of software development productivity using a frontier estimation method. The approach taken is based upon output metrics for the entire project life-cycle, and includes project quality metrics. A large number of factors potentially affecting software maintenance productivity were included in this initial investigation. The empirical analysis of a pilot data set indicated that high project quality did not necessarily reduce project productivity. Significant factors in explaining positive variations in productivity included project team capability and good system response (turnaround) time. Factors significantly associated with negative variations in productivity included lack of team application experience and high project staff loading, The use of a new structured analysis and design methodology also resulted in lower short term productivity. These preliminary results have suggested a number of new research directions and have prompted the data-site to begin a full scale data collection effort in order to validate a model of software maintenance productivity

Incentive Value of Stock Options at Information Technology Companies in the Down Markets

Stock options have been criticized as fair weather friends: good at motivating and retaining executives when the market is going up, but of little incentive value when the market is going down. The veracity of this criticism is of particular importance to executives at information technology (IT) companies, where options are used aggressively and where stock declines in 2000 were extreme. In this study, we compare the performance-effectiveness of IT CEOsí stock and option holdings in the up market of 1993 through 1999 with their performance-effectiveness in the down market of 2000. We find that stock options that were exercisable had stronger positive performance effects during 2000 than in previous years but that options that were unexercisable (not vested) had much weaker performance effects in 2000 than in previous years. For non-IT CEOs, we also observe stronger performance effects for exercisable options in 2000 but we do not observe the same weakening of performance effects for unexercisable options in 2000