Dynamic IS Cost Management

Information technology (IT) costs often exceed budgets. Causes of incorrect IT cost estimation may either be suboptimal use of the knowledge on cost behavior or the appearance of unexpected situations. We develop a dynamic model that allows IT managers to test every possible scenario concerning cost occurrences. Users of the model would customize their inputs into the model to observe possible cost patterns. When the IT managers obtain a stable boundary of costs for their company’s IT portfolio, they will be more confident of their control over IT costs

Influence and Consensus in GroupDecision Making Environment

In this research, the effect of expert support on influence and consensus in group decision making is investigated. The results indicate that ESS support diminishes the group members\u27 influence on the group judgment as well as the influence exerted by the most influential group member. On the other hand, explanations support provided by ESS increases consensus in group decision makin

Pricing Open Source Software

In this paper, we examine the issue of pricing open source software. We compare three different pricing mechanisms: commercial software, open source software dual-licensing, and open source software support. We investigate whether the open source software pricing models are viable under monopoly and duopoly when an open source software vendor competes with a commercial software vendor. Our model considers the motivation for and the barrier to open source software adoption, which provides a better picture of the open source software market. We identify the factors that affect the optimal pricing strategy of the commercial and the open source software vendors. Our results can give pricing guidelines to the open source software vendors in the case of monopoly and duopoly, which is not clear in the current state

Decision-making under asymmetric and sequential information: A case of managing business schools, incentive compatible grading scheme, student\u27s and professor\u27s decision process in academia

It has been questioned whether the community of higher education, such as universities, are being operated effectively. State universities are particularly subject to frequent criticism because of the more complex interest groups. This study recognized three main actors in a university. They are the students, professors, and the administrations. Problems faced by each of the actors are analyzed in relation to the behavior of other actors. It is done by adopting useful tools that have been proven effective in private sectors backgrounded by information economics. The first part of the paper deals with the university\u27s problem of managing professors seem as a set of human asset. Portfolio management in mutual fund with its most prevalent risk management technique is adapted to the professor management. Second part of the study is devoted to the quality evaluation of students performance in the classroom. Total Quality Management concept is applied to instruction based to classes while groups decision support system is applied to case based discussion classes. Last part of the study observes two sequential decision making situations. One situation is students\u27 time allocation strategy during a semester given sequential requirements from the course. The other situation is related to a similar problem by a newly hired professor until the tenure is attained. The situation were simulated using dynamic programming which allows sequential decision making. Proposed models are expected to improve the overall quality of higher education