Buyers' purchasing time and herd behavior on deal-of-the-day group-buying websites

Since its introduction 10years ago, group-buying websites, where buyers with similar purchase interests congregate online to obtain group discounts, have metamorphosed into several variants. The most popular variant is the deal-of-the-day group-buying website, where there is only one product/service being offered each day. Starting in the United States in 2008, this new group-buying variant has rapidly achieved tremendous success and has been widely adopted in various countries. At the end of August 2010, there were more than 1000 deal-of-the-day group-buying websites in the most competitive online marketplace, i.e., China. How exactly do buyers behave on these websites? How can deal-of-the-day group-buying website providers take advantage of buyers' behavior? Based on herd behavior, we collected and analyzed over 500 hourly orders on the most popular deal-of-the-day group-buying website in Beijing. We found that auction times and new orders for each hour have an inverted-U relationship. Moreover, we discovered that the number of existing orders will only have a positive effect on the number of new orders during the first half of the day. Contributions to research and implications for group-buying website providers are presented in the pape

Do the Different IT-Related Activities Require Different Capabilities? The Relationship Between IT Tasks, Educational Skills and Training Provision

This paper enquires into the relationship between the activities that IT professionals engage in and the educational skills and training provision that is provided to the IT workforce. To this effect, the paper on the one hand examines the degree of complexity and firm-specificity associated with the different types of tasks performed by IT professionals, whereas on the other hand it examines the educational skills and the amount of training that IT professionals need in order to perform such tasks. We test our hypotheses in the context of IT professionals in the IT Services Sector and the Retail & Wholesale sector. The paper holds implications for the IS literature, as well as IS practice in general, as it will help to better understand the optimal allocation of IT skills and investments in IT training, according the types of activities that IT professionals engage in

The building blocks of a cloud strategy:evidence from three SaaS providers

Before looking to enter a cloud-based market, weigh industry characteristics and one's own stock of design capital

Warm-Glow Giving, Hedonism, and Their Influence on Muslim User Engagement on Loan-Based Crowdfunding Platforms

This paper investigates how platform design features affect the funding motivation of Muslim users on loan-based crowdfunding platforms. Theoretically grounded in Andreoni’s warm-glow giving theory and Sober and Wilson’s model of evolutionary and psychological giving, this work has high practical relevance, given the increasing demand for Islamic financial products. Loan-based crowdfunding platforms are important to the unique context of this research since Islamic religious constraints regulate monetary transactions involving lending. We used a scenario-based survey developed on the basis of a pilot study and confirmed by our manipulation check. The results show that “hedonism” represented by monetary interest negatively affected Muslim users’ willingness to engage in a loan-based crowdfunding project. This finding challenges the commonly agreed-upon egoistic motivator for loan-based crowdfunding platforms (i.e., monetary interest), which is based on Western Christian and Chinese Confucian capitalist economic and financial paradigms. Remarkably, we also found that Muslim funders’ level of willingness to engage on the hedonistic platform had an exponentially positive effect on the amount of money that funders were willing to lend. By contrast, “warm-glow giving,” manifested as belonging to a community, had no effect on users’ engagement. Implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed

Task Coordination in Global Virtual Teams

Organizations worldwide are increasingly making use of global virtual teams (GVTs). GVTs employ advanced information and communication technologies to collaborate in geographically and temporally distributed settings. Coordination is a fundamental activity to achieve effective teamwork. Management of task coordination (i.e., task dependencies) has been found to impact team performance. While coordination in traditional teams has been well studied, GVTs, with their unique challenges to coordination, require additional research. Through an in-depth investigation of task coordination in two GVTs, this study reveals the coordination problems caused by the structural characteristics of GVTs, how GVT structures contribute to the usage of specific task coordination mechanisms, how task coordination mechanisms can overcome GVT coordination problems, and how these mechanisms affect GVT outcomes. The findings indicate that task and members’ characteristics can cause problems of duplicate work and lack of sharing of local information. Low task interdependence calls for coordination by direct supervision while high task interdependence necessitates team meetings. ICT accessibility and synchronicity characteristics may improve or impair the coordination process depending on the extent to which they can facilitate distribution of necessary information. Shared team interaction mental models may overcome the problem of duplicate work. Together with shared task and technology mental models, shared team interaction mental models also serve as important mediators between coordination mechanisms and GVT outcomes of task quality and member satisfaction. The derived model can serve to aid research on GVT task coordination and GVT practice

Influencing Environmentally Sustainable Consumer Choice through Information Transparency

A number of studies have argued that recent technological and informational affordances have enabled a greater degree of transparency, which can in turn guide consumer behavior towards more sustainable patterns of consumption. This paper examines whether sustainability attribute information influences sustainable product choice. Our hypotheses are driven by construal level theory and tested through a stated choice experiment in the context of a self-developed online grocery store. Our results show that the mere disclosure of sustainability information does not influence consumers to choose a sustainable product. Rather, the effect of sustainability information on sustainable product choice depends on the sustainability attributes provided. We discuss the contributions of our study to the literature and the implications for practitioners

The Impact of Sentiment-driven Feedback on Knowledge Reuse in Online Communities

Knowledge reuse is of increasing importance for organizations. Despite the extant research, we still do not adequately understand the ways peers are motivated to reuse knowledge with the help of wiki technologies. In this paper, we study the motivation for knowledge reuse in a prominent instance of online social production: Wikipedia. Studying knowledge reuse in Wikipedia is important since Wikipedia has been able to leverage the benefits of efficient knowledge reuse to produce knowledge goods of relatively high quality. Specifically, we explore: 1) how Wikipedia editors (any peer who contributes to developing articles in Wikipedia) communicate their feedback toward each other’s work in peer conversations and 2) to what extent sentiment-driven feedback impacts the level of knowledge reuse in Wikipedia. The results show that displaying sentiment-driven feedback positively influenced the level of knowledge reuse. Our study further shows a significant difference in the level of knowledge reuse between editors who shared mainly positive or mainly negative sentiments. Specifically, displaying mainly positive feedback corresponded to a superior level of knowledge reuse than displaying mainly negative feedback. We contribute to the extant literature of online social production communities in general and Wikipedia in particular by providing a first building block for research on peer feedback’s role in developing and sustaining wiki-based knowledge reuse. We discuss our findings’ implications for theory and practice

Investigating task coordination in globally dispersed teams:a structural contingency perspective

Task coordination poses significant challenges for globally dispersed teams (GDTs). Although various task coordination mechanisms have been proposed for such teams, there is a lack of systematic examination of the appropriate coordination mechanisms for different teams based on the nature of their task and the context under which they operate. Prior studies on collocated teams suggest matching their levels of task dependence to specific task coordination mechanisms for effective coordination. This research goes beyond the earlier work by also considering additional contextual factors of GDT (i.e., temporal dispersion and time constraints) in deriving their optimal IT-mediated task coordination mechanisms. Adopting the structural contingency theory, we propose optimal IT-mediated task coordination portfolios to fit the different levels of task dependence, temporal dispersion, and perceived time constraint of GDTs. The proposed fit is tested through a survey and profile analysis of 95 globally dispersed software development teams in a large financial organization. We find, as hypothesized, that the extent of fit between the actual IT-mediated task coordination portfolios used by the surveyed teams and their optimal portfolios proposed here is positively related to their task coordination effectiveness that in turn impacts the team's efficiency and effectiveness. The implications for theory and practice are discussed

The Consequential Institutional IT Use Among Disaster Responders: Role Stacking

This research seeks to unearth Information Technology (IT) use by disaster responders (DRs) deployed by their affiliated disaster response organizations (DROs) for natural disaster response missions. Our on-ground analysis sheds insights into how several types of IT use behavior are surfacing as the DRs concurrently serve the role of a member of the ephemeral disaster response organization and the affiliated DRO. Informed by the role expansion lens, role stacking and its consequential IT use behavior emerge to explain how behavior towards institutional IT tasks is shaped by the location and activities of the DRs. This research expands the understanding of IT use in situations where users are disentangled from a preexisting institutional boundary through mission deployments. Such an understanding is particularly important since providing IT applications to the employees is a substantial investment committed by an institution. However, users do not necessarily use the institutional IT applications in certain situations