The Effect of Socializing via Computer-mediated Communication on the Relationship between Organizational Culture and Organizational Creativity

An organization’s culture plays a strong role in its creating new knowledge, but, as organizations become more dispersed and technologies more advanced, many come to rely on computer-mediated communication (CMC) for employees to engage in all levels of knowledge management. Researchers have conducted little work to understand the effectiveness of socializing via CMC on organizational creativity, particularly as it relates to organizational culture. Some organizations tend toward a group culture, while others lean toward a rational culture. We investigate how both face-to-face (FTF) and computer-mediated socializing influence the relationship between organizational culture and organizational creativity at each cultural extreme. We surveyed 186 knowledge workers to investigate these relationships. Organizational culture interacted with socializing such that creativity in rational cultures benefited from using CMC to socialize, while group cultures appeared to be agnostic to different socializing types

The economic impact of public beta testing: the power of word-of-mouth

The advent of the Internet has brought many fundamental changes to the way business is conducted. Among others, a growing number of software firms are relying on public beta testing to improve the quality of their products before release. While the benefits resulting from improved software reliability have been widely recognized, the influences of public beta testers on the diffusion of a new software product have not been documented. Through their word-of-mouth effect, public beta testers can speed up the diffusion of a software product after release, and hence increase the time-discounted revenue per adopter. In this research, we take into consideration both the reliability-side and the diffusion-side of the benefits, and develop methodologies to help firms decide the optimal number of public beta testers and the optimal duration of public beta testing. Numerical results show the firm’s profit can increase substantially by taking advantage of the world-of-mouth of public beta testers. This benefit is more significant if firms recruit beta testers from those who can benefit from a software product but cannot afford it

Why Not Let Users Speak with Photos? An Experiment Investigating the Mechanism of Multimodal Reviews (Text & Image) on Purchase Intention

eCommerce platforms increasingly allow consumers to post their reviews using both text and images. However, most research focuses on text-only reviews, widening the gap between what happens in industry and academic research. Our understanding of multimodal reviews and their impact mechanism on consumer decisions remain unclear. Drawing on multimodal literature in communication, we first explain what multimodal reviews are and further classify them into denotative types (DT) and connotative types (CT). Next, we use the rhetorical theory to explain how reviews influence consumers’ purchase intention. We will conduct a set of experiments and explicitly measure the three rhetoric appeals (pathos, logos, ethos) for each type of review. Our approach allows us to quantify and compare the strength of each appeal, unambiguously showing the causal relationship between reviews and consumers’ purchase intention. Our study results will inform whether platform managers should implement multimodal reviews (text and image)

The Devil is in The Details: Measuring Sensory Processing Sensitivity Using Natural Language Processing

Personality traits play a strong role in our perceptions, attitudes, and decision-making behaviors in our daily lives, including our choices of words and writing patterns. While prior Information Systems (IS) research on personality typically used the Big Five personality traits as a theoretical framework, we look into measuring a comparatively new inherent personality trait, sensory processing sensitivity, using natural language processing. We collect data on twenty general essay questions from along with self-reported sensory processing sensitivity survey questions from 241 participants. We categorize participants based on survey questions with multiple methods and derive different features from the textual data. Our results show almost perfect agreement among the different methods categorizing a highly sensitive person versus a non-highly sensitive person. The initial analysis demonstrates that certain features can be of great potential in measuring sensory processing sensitivity in written text

Privacy Concerns regarding Wearable IoT Devices: How it is Influenced by GDPR?

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have implications for health and fitness. Fitness wearables can promote healthy behavior and improve an individual’s overall health and quality of life. Even though fitness wearables have various benefits, privacy concerns regarding the data collected remain as a major barrier to adoption of fitness wearables. Intrinsic factors like disposition to value privacy and extrinsic factors like privacy policies and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can influence users’ privacy concerns. This research uses experimental design to understand how these factors influence privacy concerns. The results suggest that GDPR reduces the average privacy concerns of users. The study also shows that higher perception of effectiveness of privacy policy reduces the perception of privacy risks and increases the perception of privacy control. This study illustrates the effect of users’ perceptions on factors like privacy policy, privacy control and GDPR on mitigating privacy concerns

A Brief History of the Midwest Association for Information Systems: 2005-2020

The Midwest Association for Information Systems (MWAIS), founded in 2005, was recognized as an outstanding chapter of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) for all five years of the award (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018). MWAIS continues to grow and serve academics in the Midwest and the surrounding region through annual conferences, meetings and receptions at national and international conferences, and through its journal, Journal of the Midwest Association for Information Systems (JMWAIS). This article briefly describes the impetus and actors instrumental in the creation of the association and the current state of MWAIS, its conferences, and the journal