Environmental Uncertainty and Firm Performance: an Empirical Study with Strategic Alignment in the Healthcare Industry

The healthcare industry is presently using information technology to transform itself. New strategies and tactics to increase efficiency and quality through the use of IT are being developed and implemented. Through this process, firms have to adapt to environment properly for their survival because environmental uncertainty can become either crises or opportunities and understanding environment is a pre-requisite to strategic settings. Despite these implications, little studies have been done with the nature of uncertainty of environment. In this study, we extend the concept of uncertainty to complexity-change and three types of uncertainty (state, effect, and response), and examine the relationship between the types of uncertainty and strategy, the impact of the fit between uncertainty and strategy on firm performance, and CEOs’ attention to environment with information systems in the health care industry. Using 10-k documents of firms, we find that the degree of uncertainty is associated with strategic positions between efficiency-oriented strategy and market-oriented strategy, and state uncertainty dominantly affects strategic positions. We also find that the fit between state uncertainty and efficient-oriented strategy has a positive relationship with firm performance. We do not support the moderate role of information systems between uncertainty and strategy. Finally, we find that unbalanced attentions of CEOs on external environment have a positive association with firm performance. The empirical results shed light not only on the understanding of characteristics of environmental uncertainty, but also on the designing of information systems to handle different types of environmental uncertainty

The Commoditization of IT: Evidence from a Longitudinal Text Mining Study

While Information Technology (IT) has been identified by researchers as a source of strategic advantage for businesses, commentators have argued that this reality may not endure. These commentators argue that the growing ubiquity of IT makes it a commodity input rather than a scarce and valuable resource. We examine CEOs’ Letters to Shareholders, one of the primary statements of corporate strategy, using both content analysis and latent semantic analysis, a text mining technique. Examining these letters allows us to investigate whether IT may be declining in strategic importance over time. We examine 160 annual reports from firms in the healthcare industry, covering a ten-year span of time, from 1997 through 2006. Our results indicate that the strategic emphasis placed on IT may be increasing, but its association with firm performance is declining. Our findings imply that as markets become more competitive, IT management capabilities and the strategic use of IT take on increasing importance. Our findings also imply that CEOs’ perception of the importance of IT is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for improved firm performance. This article makes two primary contributions. First, we present an empirical examination of the issue of IT commoditization as a complement to existing anecdotal discussions. Second, we demonstrate the use of latent semantic analysis (LSA), a relatively new methodology for analyzing textual data, one that is evolving into an alternative to the well-known content analysis technique

Legal Judgement Prediction for UK Courts

Legal Judgement Prediction (LJP) is the task of automatically predicting the outcome of a court case given only the case document. During the last five years researchers have successfully attempted this task for the supreme courts of three jurisdictions: the European Union, France, and China. Motivation includes the many real world applications including: a prediction system that can be used at the judgement drafting stage, and the identification of the most important words and phrases within a judgement. The aim of our research was to build, for the first time, an LJP model for UK court cases. This required the creation of a labelled data set of UK court judgements and the subsequent application of machine learning models. We evaluated different feature representations and different algorithms. Our best performing model achieved: 69.05% accuracy and 69.02 F1 score. We demonstrate that LJP is a promising area of further research for UK courts by achieving high model performance and the ability to easily extract useful features

Insiders Share Pledging and Earning Management

We examine the association between insiders share pledging and earning management. Using the disclosure information of insiders share pledging, we find that as insiders increase share pledging, they tend to make earnings management although the direction of earnings management is uncertain. We also find that foreigners??? ownership structure and the level of governance do not related with earnings management. On the contrary, leverage and profitability of a firm shows a negative association with insiders share pledging

The Effects of Featured Advertising and Package Labeling on Sustainability of Cause-Related Marketing (CRM) Products

This paper seeks to examine the relative efficacy of cause-related marketing (CRM) product package labeling versus featured advertising efficacy on market performance. One natural setting using scanner data from a grocery store chain and an open-ended survey were conducted to evaluate the financial performance of featured advertising and product labeling in terms of sustainability of cause-related marketing products. Our findings suggest that cause-related marketing product package labeling without featured advertising appears to provide a competitive advantage resulting in superior financial performance. Also, featured advertising without product package labeling boosts products sales. However, when featured advertising is applied to cause-related marketing product package labeling, the effect of such labeling is diminished. Based on our findings, we suggest that final and intermediate sellers of cause-related marketing products should deliver a persuasive message about the sustainability of cause-related marketing products in the context of a conspicuous environment (e.g., Facebook and Twitter). Although featured advertisements and product package labels are two of the most widely-used tools to promote cause-related marketing products, the cause-related marketing literature has largely neglected a meaningful comparison between the two. This paper seeks to fill the gap in the literature

The Determination of Children’s Knowledge of Global Lunar Patterns from Online Essays Using Text Mining Analysis

The purpose of this study was to use text mining analysis of early adolescents’ online essays to determine their knowledge of global lunar patterns. Australian and American students in grades five to seven wrote about global lunar patterns they had discovered by sharing observations with each other via the Internet. These essays were analyzed for the students’ inclusion of words associated with the shape (i.e., phase), orientation and location of the Moon along with words about similarities and differences. Almost all students wrote about shape but fewer wrote about orientation or location. Students infrequently included words about similarities or differences in the same sentence with shape, orientation or location. Similar to studies about children’s and adults’ lunar misconceptions, it was found that male and female early adolescents also lacked a robust understanding of global lunar patterns