Examining the Role of Privacy Policy on Host Information Disclosure on Accommodation Sharing Platforms

In recent years, more and more people embrace accommodation sharing services via online community marketplaces such as Airbnb, Couchsurfing, Homestay, and Vacation Rental by Owner (VRBO). In the meanwhile, consumers’ concerns on the privacy and safety that arise from online transactions and social interactions on participating in accommodation sharing are increasingly growing. The goal of this research is to investigate the impact of privacy policy on hosts’ privacy concern, security concern, perceived benefits, and information disclosure on the accommodation sharing platforms (ASPs).Our study complements the existing privacy literature by demonstrating that hosts’ participation in ASPs depend on extrinsic benefits, perceived risks, and platform features. Therefore, we provide supporting empirical evidence to earlier theoretical developments that emphasize the role of privacy calculus on individual’s self-disclosure behavior. Additionally, this study takes the first step to bridge the gap in the existing literature that has so far ignored the different dimensions of privacy concern. Our research advances this body of knowledge by showing that on ASPs, hosts can have both privacy concern and security concern. The existing privacy policy can effectively reduce hosts’ concern about platform’s privacy invasion but fail to alleviate hosts’ concern that derives from other platform visitors\u27 opportunistic behavior

Effects of Intellectual and Social Alignment on Organizational Agility: A Configurational Theory Approach

Literature has shown that business-information technology (IT) alignment can exert both positive and negative influences on organizational agility, giving rise to the IT alignment-agility paradox. To better understand this paradox at a more granular level, we conceptualize the sensing and responding dimensions of organizational agility as two independent constructs and suggest a nonlinear analytical approach. Based on configurational and contextual perspectives, this study investigates how intellectual and social alignment and organizational and environmental elements combine into multiple configurations to affect sensing and responding capabilities. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is used to analyze the survey data from 135 dyads of business and IT executives from the Chinese shipbuilding industry. Results show that different equifinal pathways can be used to achieve high sensing and responding capabilities, in which intellectual and social alignment play heterogeneous roles depending on the specific contexts. This study extends the IT-enabled agility literature by deepening our understanding of the effects of multidimensional IT alignment on multidimensional organizational agility and providing new insights into the IT alignment-agility paradox

Privacy Policy and Hosts’ Concerns on Accommodation Sharing Platforms

Accommodation-sharing services are gaining great popularity via online community platforms in recent years. Meanwhile, users’ privacy concerns over social interactions and online transactions on these platforms are escalating. This study investigates whether and how privacy policy can properly mitigate hosts’ privacy concerns, enhance perceived benefits, and subsequently encourage their information disclosure on the accommodation sharing platforms (ASPs). Through a scenario-based survey and a controlled experiment, we find that the hosts are more concerned about the other users’ misappropriating the private information that the hosts disclose on the platform than the platforms’ privacy invasion behaviors. However, this major concern is not significantly mitigated by the current privacy policy. Moreover, privacy policy engenders two types of perceived benefits, among which the perceived social benefit has a stronger effect than economic benefit on the hosts’ intentions to disclose information on ASPs

The Moderating Role of Absorptive Capacity in the Assimilation of Enterprise Information Systems

We attempt to understand how external institutional forces affecting ERP assimilation within organizations need not impact all organizations uniformly but instead can be moderated by the enterprises\u27knowledge-based capabilities. Building on an institutional model of ERP assimilation, we investigate the role of absorptive capacity (ACAP) in ERP assimilation. Specifically we examine how the ACAP of an organization can enhance or retard the effect of institutional forces on the degree of ERP assimilation. Following a recent framework we operationalize ACAP as potential ACAP (PACAP) and realized ACAP (RACAP) and find that both dimensions affect ERP assimilation in different ways. While both, PACAP and RACAP, have a direct positive impact on assimilation, PACAP moderates the impact of mimetic forces on assimilation whereas RACAP moderates the effect of normative pressures. While we find overall a strong support for our hypothesized model, interestingly, we also find that RACAP negatively moderates the effect of mimetic pressures on assimilation. We discuss the contributions of this study to a better understanding of IT assimilation processes

IMPLEMENTATION KNOWLEDGE AND THE ASSIMILATION OF ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

Based on the organizational learning perspective, we present an empirical model to explain the assimilation of complex enterprise systems. We conceptualize systems implementation capability of organizations in terms of two types of knowledge – artifactual knowledge and inter-unit coordination knowledge. We propose that these knowledge dimensions are directly related to the degree of assimilation of enterprise systems. Further, considering that assimilation of IT innovations is steeped in the institutional environment, we also consider the moderating effects of mimetic and normative institutional pressures on the relationship between implementation knowledge and the degree of assimilation. Analysis of survey responses from ERP implementations in seventy-seven organizations reveals support for our main hypotheses that both the implementation knowledge dimensions directly affect assimilation. We also confirm that while mimetic institutional pressures positively moderate the impact of ERP-specific artifactual knowledge on assimilation, normative influences positively moderate the effect of ERP-specific coordination knowledge on assimilation. However, surprisingly mimetic pressures negatively moderate the impact of ERP-specific coordination knowledge on assimilation. The negative moderation suggests that organizations with greater interunit coordination knowledge are more ‘mindful’ towards ERP assimilation and therefore mimetic pressures play a lesser role in affecting assimilation levels. Our findings offer interesting implications for theory and practice

Vacancy-Mediated Magnetism in Pure Copper Oxide Nanoparticles

Room temperature ferromagnetism (RTF) is observed in pure copper oxide (CuO) nanoparticles which were prepared by precipitation method with the post-annealing in air without any ferromagnetic dopant. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) result indicates that the mixture valence states of Cu1+ and Cu2+ ions exist at the surface of the particles. Vacuum annealing enhances the ferromagnetism (FM) of CuO nanoparticles, while oxygen atmosphere annealing reduces it. The origin of FM is suggested to the oxygen vacancies at the surface/or interface of the particles. Such a ferromagnet without the presence of any transition metal could be a very good option for a class of spintronics

Metabolism of Flavonoids in Novel Banana Germplasm during Fruit Development

Banana is a commercially important fruit, but its flavonoid composition and characteristics has not been well studied in detail. In the present study, the metabolism of flavonoids was investigated in banana pulp during the entire developmental period of fruit. ‘Xiangfen 1’, a novel flavonoid-rich banana germplasm, was studied with ‘Brazil’ serving as a control. In both varieties, flavonoids were found to exist mainly in free soluble form and quercetin was the predominant flavonoid. The most abundant free soluble flavonoid was cyanidin-3-O-glucoside chloride, and quercetin was the major conjugated soluble and bound flavonoid. Higher content of soluble flavonoids was associated with stronger antioxidant activity compared with the bound flavonoids. Strong correlation was observed between antioxidant activity and cyanidin-3-O-glucoside chloride content, suggesting that cyanidin-3-O-glucoside chloride is one of the major antioxidants in banana. In addition, compared with ‘Brazil’ , ‘Xiangfen 1’ fruit exhibited higher antioxidant activity and had more total flavonoids. These results indicate that soluble flavonoids play a key role in the antioxidant activity of banana, and ‘Xiangfen 1’ banana can be a rich source of natural antioxidants in human diets