Competitive Benchmarking: An IS Research Approach to Address Wicked Problems with Big Data and Analytics

Wicked problems like sustainable energy and financial market stability are societal challenges that arise from complex socio-technical systems in which numerous social, economic, political, and technical factors interact. Understanding and mitigating them requires research methods that scale beyond the traditional areas of inquiry of Information Systems (IS) “individuals, organizations, and markets” and that deliver solutions in addition to insights. We describe an approach to address these challenges through Competitive Benchmarking (CB), a novel research method that helps interdisciplinary research communities to tackle complex challenges of societal scale by using different types of data from a variety of sources such as usage data from customers, production patterns from producers, public policy and regulatory constraints, etc. for a given instantiation. Further, the CB platform generates data that can be used to improve operational strategies and judge the effectiveness of regulatory regimes and policies. We describe our experience applying CB to the sustainable energy challenge in the Power Trading Agent Competition (Power TAC) in which more than a dozen research groups from around the world jointly devise, benchmark, and improve IS-based solutions

Are Hermeneutics and the Austrian Approach Compatible? A Clarifying Analysis

This paper investigates the merging of the Austrian Approach and Hermeneutics under a new light. It defends a middle ground between the standpoint of the Austrian hermeneutists and that of their critics. The latter, especially Rothbard, considered hermeneutics to be incompatible with Austrian School because they confused hermeneutics with what Mises calls "polylogism", i.e. with cognitive nihilism. Their view was incorrect, but their criticism of the Austrian hermeneutists was not completely unfounded. Austrian hermeneutists did not clearly separate what they called hermeneutics from the postmodernist epistemologies of authors such as Derrida, Kuhn, and Rorty. This article demonstrates that hermeneutics as intended by Gadamer, its greatest theorist, has nothing to do with postmodernism. It is a fallibilist theory of the objective truth in the sense of Popper. So it is compatible both with the Austrians' antipolylogism and their methodological individualism