Strategic Choices in IS Infrastructure: Corporate Standards Versus Best of Breed Systems

A key IS infrastructure policy decision is whether to let each department select its own \u27Best of Breed system solutions, which may be incompatible with each other, or to mandate the adoption of a uniform corporate standard, which may not be deemed suitable by some departments. Our paper examines the salient trade-offs involved in makingsuchcriticaldecisions. Weidentifycaseswhereinstallationofdisparatesystemsispreferablefromanoverall corporate perspective and those where all departments are required to adopt the same system. The paper shows that: (I) If the organization requires all departments to use the same standard system, then it is always better off delegating this choice of a particular standard to a negotiating process among the departments. (ii) ha certain situations, the organization benefits by letting departments install different systems that are best suited to their needs (Best of Breed). (iii) Site-licensing may adversely affect the adoption of a standard system as a result of a dysfunctional response which we term shadow-rider behavior: deparunents initially mask their true preferences and do not contribute to the purchase of site licenses, but later try and switch to gain cheap usage of the system once it is licensed

Achieving First-Mover Advantage Through Product Customization on the Internet

The Internet provides an unprecedented capability for sellers to learn about their customers and offer custom products at special prices. Advanced manufacturing technologies have improved sellers’ manufacturing flexibility. To examine how these advances affect sellers’ products and pricing, we first develop a model of product customization and flexible pricing to incorporate the salient roles of the Internet and flexible manufacturing technologies in reducing the costs of designing and producing tailored consumer goods. Simultaneous adoption of customization in a duopolywill lead to reduced product differentiation but will not facilitate the price competition between their standard products. Consumer surplus improves after sellers adopt customization but does not always increase as technologies advance. When firms face a fixed entry cost and adopt customization sequentially, the first entrant always achieves a profit advantage and may even deter the entry of the second entrant by choosing his customization scope strategically

Patient Choice in Acute Care

Consumer healthcare information plays a critical \ role in informing patients who participate in or make healthcare \ decisions for themselves without direct supervision of a healthcare \ professional. One such example is the choice of facility for \ acute care, prototypically between a fully equipped emergency \ care department (ED) at a hospital and a more convenient \ but less capable urgent care (UC) or retail clinic. We model \ a strategic patient making this decision taking into account the \ limited medical information and convenience factors that affect \ the patient’s decision. This model is then used to inform the \ pricing decision made by the manager of the UC. We show that \ a separating equilibrium, in which all patients self-triaged as noncritical \ choose to go to the UC first, dominates pooling equilibria \ for moderate error rates in self-triage. We analyze the separating \ equilibrium to examine the effect of consumer health information \ (CHI) systems, and show that as the quality of the CHI decreases \ and the error rates go up, the co-pay for an UC decreases, the \ facility is smaller, and makes less profit

Introduction to Strategy, Information, Technology, Economics, and Society (SITES) Minitrack

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