The Impact of Information Security Events on the Stock Value of Firms: The Effect of Contingency Factors

The stock market reactions to information technology (IT)-related events have often been used as proxies to the value or cost of these events in the information systems literature. In this paper, we study the stock market reactions to information-security-related events using the event analysis methodology with consideration of the effects of a number of contingency factors, including business type, industry, type of breach, event year, and length of event window. We found that pure e-commerce firms experienced higher negative market reactions than traditional bricks-and-mortar firms in the event of security breach. We also found that denial of service attacks had higher negative impact than other types of security breaches. Finally, security events occurred in recent years were found to have less significant impact than those occurred earlier, suggesting that investors may have become less sensitive to the security events. Most interestingly, our analyses showed that the magnitude and longevity of security breaches vary with time across sub-samples. This raises some serious questions regarding the validity of analyzing only short-term stock market reactions as an indicator of the cost of security breaches, and in general, an indicator of the value of IT-related events. The implications of these results are discussed and potential future research directions are proposed

The Impact of IT-Business Strategic Alignment on Firm Performance: The Role of Environmental Uncertainty and Business Strategy

Aligning information technology (IT) strategy with business strategy has been one of the top concerns of practitioners and scholars for decades. Although numerous studies have documented the positive effects of IT-business alignment on organizational performance, few considered the contextual factors that may influence the relationship. This study attempts to fulfill this gap by investigating the role of environmental uncertainty and business strategy on the performance effects of the strategic alignment. Using survey data and statistical analysis, we show that the positive effect of the strategic alignment is significant only in high uncertainty environments. We also find that these effects on organizational performance vary across business strategies and performance measures. The main contribution of this study is the investigation of strategic alignment-performance relationship with respect to different contextual factors, thus providing a richer insight into IT-business strategic alignment issues

Analyzing community contributions to the development of community wireless networks

Community wireless networks (CWNs) have emerged as collective actions achieved by many communities worldwide to access the information highway. Developing autonomous CWNs depends, in large part, on community contributions that may include time, money, efforts, expertise and computer resources. However, there is a lack of instruments for measuring such contributions, as well as the outcomes of these networks. This study uses the social network analysis analytical approach to model, measure and analyze community contributions in the development of their wireless infrastructures. In particular, we model community contributions as a two-mode (or bipartite) graph composed of two sets of nodes: the first represents a set of community contributors and the other represents a set of wireless networks. The edges between these two sets stand for the inputs of contributors. Their contributions include volunteering time and manpower, sharing their wireless nodes with community members, donating money, donating hardware, providing technical support, and developing open source software for the network. The model is used to analyze these tangible and intangible forms of contributions. We hope this study provides a better understanding and sounder measurement of the role of communities in developing these emerging common wireless infrastructures and similar digital collective actions

Antecedents and drivers of IT-business strategic alignment: Empirical validation of a theoretical model

Aligning information technology (IT) strategy with business strategy has been one of the top concerns of practitioners and scholars for decades. Despite the documented positive effects of strategic alignment on organizational success, only a few organizations consider themselves in alignment. Although numerous studies exist about how to accomplish IT-business alignment, empirical studies based on strong theories have been rare in the literature. This study attempts to fulfill this gap by proposing and empirically validating a comprehensive strategic alignment model. Drawing on prior literature, we identified five antecedents of alignment; centralization, formalization, shared domain knowledge, successful IT history and relationship management. We further hypothesized that the effects of these antecedents are mediated by two drivers of alignment, which are conceptualized as the level of connection of IT and business planning and the level of communication between IT and business managers. Using survey data and structural equation modeling methodology, we show that both drivers had significant effects on alignment, and the effect of connection is about twice that of communications. Our findings also confirm the effects of all antecedents except centralization. Overall, the main contribution of this study is the development and empirical validation of a comprehensive strategic alignment model, providing a more ample prescriptive insight for managing IT-business strategic alignment

Why College Students Commit Computer Hacks: Insights from a Cross Culture Analysis

Computer hacking committed by young adults has become an epidemic that threatens the social and economic prosperity brought by information technology around the world. In this study, we extend previous studies on computer hackers with a cross cultural approach by comparing sources of influence on computer hacking in two countries: China and the United States. This comparative study yielded some significant insights about the contributing factors to the computer hacking phenomenon in these two countries. While some factors are consistent, others are distinctly different, across the two samples. We find that moral beliefs about computer hacking are the most consistent antidote against computer hacking intentions among the Chinese and the American college students. On the other hand, we find that playing computer games (team sports) significantly increases (decreases) the intention to computer hacking in the Chinese college students, but has no significant effect on the American college students. In addition, we find that hypotheses based on routine activity and self-control theories are modestly supported by the two samples; however, each sample supports distinct dimensions of the two theories. Hofstede’s national cultural framework provides salient explanations to these differences in the two samples

The Unique Challenges of Seller Uncertainty in Sharing Economy-A Decision Making Perspective

The goal of this paper is to answer features of sharing economies such as the types of uncertainty users face while making decisions under sharing economy, reactions to those uncertainties, and the way customers cope when making an informed decision

Guiding the Herd: The Effect of Reference Groups in Crowdfunding Decision Making

Despite their popularity, crowdfunding platforms are experiencing negative headlines as fully funded projects continue to fail delivering the products on time. Current literature postulates that funders make decisions by following the decisions of the crowd, and this herd behavior leads to less than optimal decisions. One explanation of the negative externalities of such behavior is the misfit between the information provided by the crowd and the information needed by funders. Especially in patronage crowdfunding, funders are investors and buyers at the same time. This duality coupled with the lack of supervision of projects creates unique challenges. In addition to opportunism uncertainty, funders face competence uncertainty. This study provides evidence that social information gathered from reference groups decrease these uncertainties. Further investigation showed that different reference groups provide different types of social information and product complexity plays a role in the uncertainties experienced and the importance given to different reference groups

Institutional environment for entrepreneurship: evidence from the developmental states of South Korea and United Arab Emirates

The purpose of this research is to examine country institutional profile for encouraging entrepreneurial activity in two developmental states: South Korea and United Arab Emirates. Data was collected from business students in the two countries to examine the favorability of their institutional environment for entrepreneurship. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated high reliability, construct validity and internal consistency for the Korean and Arabic language versions of the questionnaire instrument in the respective countries. Results revealed important cross-national differences between the two countries in the regulatory, cognitive and normative dimensions of the institutional environment. Implications, limitations and future research directions are discussed. © 2012 World Scientific Publishing Company