Evaluation via Extended Orderings: Empirical Findings from West and East

The theoretical background of the empirical investigations to be reported in this paper are positionalist aggregation functions which are numerically representable. More concretely, the broad Borda rule is proposed as an aggregation mechanism for the case of a complete set (profile) of so-called individual extended orderings. The Borda rule becomes an interpersonal positional rule and it is modified to reflect considerations of equity. Such considerations are introduced by transforming the original linear weighting system such that an equity axiom well known from the social choice literature is satisfied. Students from Osnabr*ck University and from universities in the Baltic States were confronted with questionnaires that describe six 'situations', most of which reflect different aspects of needs. All situations start from the preference structure which underlies the equity axiom, viz. there is one person who is worst off under two alternatives x and y. This person is better off under x than under y whereas all the other individuals who are introduced successively are better off under y than x. Three of the points were are focusing on are: (a) What is the percentage of respondents satisfying the equity axiom? (b) How often do the students revise their initial decision when more and more people join the side of the more advantaged? (c) Are there major differences in the empirical results between West and East? We have found that Western students satisfy the equity axiom to a high degree but they are not willing to follow Rawl's unique focus on the worst of (group of) individual(s) unconditionally, i.e. independently of the number of persons involved. There are stunning differences between the results from the East and the West. Though the number of students from Osnabr*ck involved in the study is much higher than the number of students from the three Baltic States, it is fair to say that aspects of neediness and the protection of basic human rights currently aredistributive justice, Rawlsianism, equity considerations

A typology of cooperation strategies in the telecommunication industry: An exploratory analysis and theoretical foundations

The value chain of the telecommunication industry is subject to a continuing disintegration which is caused by outsourced network operation, the provisioning of wholesale interfaces to competing service providers and the cooperative provisioning of broadband access. Thus, many companies regard cooperation as an element of cooperate strategy. In this paper we propose a cooperation topology for the telecommunication industry and identify drivers of cooperation based on the assessment of case studies. The results indicate that drivers of cooperation differ with respect to the cooperation direction and that the combination of complementary resources is the dominating driver of cooperation. --Cooperation,telecommunication,typology of cooperation strategies,transaction costs

Competition of Fixed and Mobile Broadband - Separate Markets, Overlap or Takeover?

Mutual effects between fixed and mobile broadband technologies remain up to this date largely unexplored. The few studies on this subject produce partially contradictory results. Diffusion oriented analysis approaches focused on cross-product effects on growth. Mutual effects on the market potential level have not been studied. In this article we develop and apply two diffusion models, which cover partial market overlap and takeover. We carry out linear and nonlinear regressions with data on country-level broadband adoption. A comparison of the results provides two main implications. (1.) Mobile broadband adoption is stimulated by a high level of broadband adoption; reverse effects on fixed broadband growth are not significant. (2.) A portion of the fixed broadband market capacity is taken over by mobile broadband services. This reduces the untapped market potential of fixed broadband. The results motivate further analyses of moderators for cross-product effects such as demographic and market-oriented country characteristics

Cross-Sector Competition in Telecommunications - An Empirical Analysis of Diversification Activities

Cross-sector competition in the information and communications technology sectors (ICT sectors) constitutes a key strategic challenge for telecommunications companies. Due to increasing convergence, value creation is resulting in a greater degree of interaction. The diversification potential of telecommunications businesses is therefore changing with respect to associated ICT sectors, such as hardware, software and media. The article analyses cross-sector competition in the telecommunications industry on the basis of the diversification activities of ICT companies. A concentration of competitive interdependence in the ICT sectors is demonstrated using a cluster analysis of 34,142 companies. The cross-sector activities of telecommunications companies are investigated using contingency and dependency analyses, and the diversification- related competition in the telecommunications sector is also analysed. With regard to the telecommunications sector, particularly high level cross-sector competition with the media industry is identified, as well as strong diversification activities in the software sector. The results are used to derive the potentials and risks that have a significant bearing on the structure of the cross-sector competitive environment of telecommunications companies

Health promotion with physiolytics: What is driving people to subscribe in a data-driven health plan?

Data-driven health promotion programs and health plans try to harness the new possibilities of ubiquitous and pervasive physiolytics devices. In this paper we seek to explore what drives people to subscribe to such a data-driven health plan. Our study reveals that the decision to subscribe to a data-driven health plan is strongly influenced by the beliefs of seeing physiolytics as enabler for positive health behavior change and of perceiving health insurances as trustworthy organizations that are capable of securely and righteously manage the data collected by physiolytics

HOW DO ICT FIRMS REACT TO CONVERGENCE? AN ANALYSIS OF DIVERSIFICATION STRATEGIES

Convergence represents a dominant force in the evolution of the ICT industry. Under convergence, the identification and analysis of strategies to efficiently leverage firm resources and to configure firm cooperations represents a challenging task. Diversification is considered a central firm strategy with regard to convergence. Former research has mainly focused on the phenomenon of ICT convergence per se. In this article, we analyse how ICT firms react to convergence. Network analysis techniques are applied to assess the degree to which ICT market segments are exposed to convergence. Based on this assessment, we evaluate firm diversification strategies under convergence with a focus on diversification objectives and firm performance. The data analysis provides two major implications. Firstly, convergence creates synergy potentials for diversifying ICT firms. Secondly, diversification does not generally allow ICT firms, which are exposed to convergence, a more efficient application of resources. Even though the term convergence is often cited in ICT research, empirical analyses addressing ICT convergence and firm strategies are rather scarce. This work provides such an analysis by applying a novel research approach based on network analysis

A Socio-Technical Approach to Study Consumer-Centric Information Systems

Given the unprecedented role of digital service platforms in private life, this research sets out to identify the mechanisms that are designed into information systems with the purpose to increase consumer centricity. We evaluate the consumer centricity of an information system against three reflective indicators, that is the degree of need orientation, value co-creation and relationship orientation and conceptualize consumer centricity as the ability to align social and technical information system components. We employ a positivist, explanatory case study approach to test three hypotheses on system component alignment in cases from three domains (gaming, social networking, and video sharing). We found preliminary evidence for three alignment mechanisms that increase consumer centricity. With this research, we plan to contribute to the literature on consumer-centric information systems by elaborating and empirically grounding a socio-technical approach to study mechanisms and their joint application to increase consumer centricity in information systems

Consumer-Centric Information Systems: A Literature Review and Avenues for Further Research

While consumer centricity has been extensively discussed as a concept of organizational transformation in the marketing domain, there is little research on its operationalization as a characteristic of information systems and associated antecedents.We review the marketing literature to understand generic organizational objectives of consumer centricity which are then generalized as characteristics of consumer-centric information systems. In a second step, we draw on socio-technical theory to conceptualize antecedents of consumer centricity as capabilities to align social and technical system components.Our research contributes to the body of knowledge by theoretically deriving an operationalization and antecedents of consumer centricity in IS research. This paper lays the foundation for a structured review of IS literature to theorize on component alignment capabilities as antecedents of consumer centricity. It further is the basis for case study research to construct a nomological network for consumer-centric information systems

Measuring IT Service Management Capability: Scale Development and Empirical Validation

This paper conceptualizes IT service management (ITSM) capability, a key competence of today\u27s IT provider organizations, and presents a survey instrument to facilitate the measurement of an ITSM capability for research and practice. Based on the review of four existing ITSM maturity models (CMMI-SVC, COBIT 4.1, SPICE, ITIL v3), we first develop a multi-attributive scale to assess maturity on an ITSM process level. We then use this scale in a survey with 205 ITSM key informants who assessed IT provider organizations along a set of 26 established ITSM processes. Our exploratory factor analysis and measurement model assessment results support the validity of an operationali-zation of ITSM capability as a second-order construct formed by ITSM pro-cesses that form three dimensions: service planning, service transition, and ser-vice operation. The practical utility of our survey instrument and avenues for future research on ITSM capability are outlined

Specifying Enabling Services in Telecommunications Service Systems

In telecommunications, increasingly complex service systems evolve which have the objective to produce ICT services. The increased complexity is due to the convergence of the industry sectors information technology, telecommunications and media. Telecommunication network operators are challenged to modify their business strategies: they can not any more produce ICT services in a vertically integrated fashion but need to market preliminary services as suppliers for other ICT service providers. For this task, modular service concepts known from Service Science and IS research can be employed. ICT service modules, so called Enabling Services, are provided on Service Delivery Platforms to support service development. In this work, an Enabling Service conceptualization is developed. Based on a case study, a process for the specification of Enabling Services is presented