Investigation of Governance Mechanisms for Crowdsourcing Initiatives

Crowdsourcing has increasingly become a recognized sourcing mechanism for problem-solving in organizations by outsourcing the problem to an undefined entity or the ‘crowd’. While the phenomenon of crowdsourcing is not new, it has gained considerable attention in practice due to new crowdsourcing opportunities that have been enabled by new social networking and web 2.0 technologies. While crowdsourcing initiatives provide several benefits for the participants involved, it also poses several novel challenges to effectively manage the crowd. Drawing from the governance mechanisms in the open source literature, we develop an analysis framework to examine the governance mechanisms implemented in three different crowdsourcing initiatives and their impact on the outcome of the initiative

Private Hospital Behavior Under Government Insurance: Evidence from Reimbursement Changes in India

In a major shift away from direct public provision, governments around the world are expanding public insurance programs that contract the private sector to deliver health services at pre-specified reimbursement rates. These rates are a key policy lever to shape provider incentives, but there is little evidence on their effects in lower-income contexts with limited regulatory capacity. Using over 1.6 million insurance claims and 20,000 patient surveys, and exploiting a policy-induced natural experiment, this paper provides evidence on private hospital responses to reimbursement rate changes under government health insurance in India. It shows that: 1) Private hospitals engage in coding manipulation to increase revenues at government expense. Manipulation is highly responsive to changes in the relative reimbursement rates of similar services. 2) Rate increases also induce an increase in service volumes. 3) Hospitals charge patients for care that should be free under program rules. Raising rates reduces these charges significantly, but hospitals capture about half of the increase. Pass-through is driven entirely by less concentrated markets, suggesting that competition limits hospital capture of public subsidies. There is no evidence of changes in care quality or patient composition. These findings highlight the critical role of prices and market structure when contracting the private sector for delivery of social services

Contextual Analysis of Enterprise Mobile Services Requirements

This article presents a framework to classify various types of mobile services implemented in organizational settings. Based on the objectives of wireless information systems (WIS), we identify three categories viz. enterprise mobile services, enterprise-advantage mobile services, and consumer mobile services. While the last two categories of mobile services have received broader attention, there has not been much work done in analyzing the role of mobile services in the organizational settings specific to various industries. In this article, we attempt to fill this void by synthesizing the extant literature in this area. Based on the degree of user\u27s mobility in their organizational settings, we categorize enterprise mobile services in three subcategories. This categorization helps identijy differences in the information access needs of users. We then discuss how firms belonging to various industries can benefit from mobile services and various issues that need to be addressed before embracing such services. Finally this paper concludes with identification of potential research topics

Dynamic Outsourcing with Web Services: A Multi-Faceted Perspective

In a fully dynamic web services implementation, business processes are supported by allocating the underlying information processing tasks to many inter-operating service modules, each of which would be procured over the Internet from an on-line market for web services. In this research we propose to investigate the web services adoption phenomena from three different perspectives viz. business process outsourcing, innovation adoption, and web-based commerce. We use the ‘technology-push and need-pull’ framework and integrate it with dynamic outsourcing and web-based commerce factors to get the richer and deeper insight into the WS adoption phenomenon

Transitioning from product to platform-based firm: An empirical investigation

In this research, through a qualitative field study we empirically examine how firms make a transition from product based firm to a platform based firm. While platform literature has been a fertile ground for understanding issues of platform strategy, economics, and governance, there has been relatively less attention given to how firms become platform oriented. We examine how they grow their portfolio of products to a point where the need for platform based approach becomes evident in a firm’s ability to rapidly meet the customer needs. Specifically, we aim to understand how firm mobilizes its various resources and coordinates their impact to achieve this transition

Improving Process Agility with Process Repositories for Business Process Modeling

As organizations continue to manage growth by developing a diverse portfolio of products and services in semiautonomous business units, they become increasingly fragmented internally. Such fragmentation results in highly diversified business processes for performing similar activities, leading to reduced operational efficiency, coordination, and information sharing. Horizontal business process integration entails change in temporal and spatial dimensions to mitigate this problem and identify common processes to help achieve synergies. Current research on Business Process Management has not paid much attention to enabling this activity. Motivated by this concern, the primary objective of my dissertation is: “how horizontal integration of business processes is achieved by semiautonomous business units to realize the benefits of better operational efficiency, information sharing, and coordination?” Using a two-phased approach I address this objective. In the first phase I develop a process theory of BPM in horizontal integration using grounded theory methodology. Also, this study identifies the rich contextual knowledge that is necessary to understand and reuse business process fragments. This study was conducted in a very large U.S. corporation as a part of an initiative to identify core processes in a multi-billion dollar supply chain process. Based on the findings of the first phase, in the second phase I develop a decision support system to aid process designers to help find similarities in process models. The effectiveness of the system for improving performance in business process modeling activities is evaluated using an experiment

Negotiating Strategic Business Value of BPM Systems: A Balanced Scorecard Approach

There has been a growing interest in how Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives can be used to improve competitive advantage of organizations. Discussion in the current literature is often centered on how operational efficiencies can be gained by the implementation of BPM initiatives. However, to fully realize the strategic opportunities made possible with BPM, it is necessary to take an approach that evaluates BPM not only on the financial aspects, but also on other intangible/ non-financial aspects. In this paper, we demonstrate how the balanced scorecard approach can be used for negotiating strategic business value of business process management initiatives to gain support from the various stakeholders

Women Left Behind: Gender Disparities in Utilization of Government Health Insurance in India

We document large gender disparities within a government program that entitles 46 million poor individuals to free hospital care. We show that care is not free in practice and higher costs are associated with larger disparities. Lowering care costs increases female utilization but does not reduce gender disparities because marginal beneficiaries are as likely to be male as inframarginals. Long-term exposure to local female leaders reduces disparities by addressing factors lowering female care. In the presence of gender bias, subsidizing social services may fail to address gender inequalities without actions that specifically target females. (JEL H51, I12, I13, I14, J16, O15