Distributed group support systems: Social dynamics and design dilemmas

A “distributed group support system”; includes decision support tools and structures embedded within a computer‐mediated communication system rather than installed in a “decision room.”; It should support groups who are distributed in space but not time ("synchronous”; groups), as well as “asynchronous”; groups whose members participate at different times. Pilot studies conducted in preparation for a series of controlled experiments are reviewed in order to identify some of the problems of implementing such a system. Many of the means used by groups meeting in the same place at the same time to coordinate their activities are missing. Embedding decision support tools within a different communications medium and environment changes the way they “work.”; Speculations are presented about software tools and structuring or facilitation procedures that might replace the “missing”; coordination channels.     

Virtual organizations: Computer conferencing and organizational design

Computer conferencing systems link groups of users who “meet”; in the virtual space of a computer and interact around a common purpose or topic. These electronically constituted and mediated groups can mirror, cross‐cut, or hive off from existing organizational structures. This article reports a study of organizational structuring processes that accompany the introduction of a computer conferencing system in six industrial organizations. The relationships among technological capabilities and constraints, existing organization structures, managerial intent, and the unanticipated consequences of implementation for structural change are discussed. Employing the same software system in each case, organizational outcomes are radically different.

Earlier analysts have focused on a contingency model of the organization‐to‐technology relationship. Computer conferencing systems, however, confound the distinction between technical and organizational systems; they exist in an overlapping border domain between their two parent systems. This article explores the character of this overlapping domain and proposes the terms “virtual group”; and “virtual organization”; to evoke the special status of groups created through computer conferencing. Virtual organizations are semiotic entities in Weick's [1] sense of equivoque and their essentially ambiguous, interpretable character is important in shaping organizational outcomes. Virtual groups become part of the ongoing process of structuration [2], while also providing a new tool for organizational design.     

Collaboration,motivation, and the size of organizations

We present an analytical model of an organization that offers operational drivers of limits on team size. The model trades off benefits from collaborative problem solving against the disadvantages of diminishing motivation when groups get large. Collaboration is represented as parallel employee activity combined with frequent sharing of partial information, with a resulting superlinear performance increase over team size. Motivation is modeled by team members periodically setting an effort level either to contribute to the best of their ability or to “cruise”; at the minimum level not recognizable as shirking. Each individual decision is limited by bounded rationality based on team rewards, the time horizon of team interaction, and individual expectations about colleagues’ behavior. The decision collapses to a simple “barrier rule”;. Work hard when a certain “barrier percentage”; of team members work hard, and otherwise shirk. The influence of team size on this barrier percentage depends on the extent of benefits from collaboration: As long as performance increases quadratically with team size, the increased benefits resulting from collaboration exactly balance the temptation to shirk, with the barrier percentage approaching a fixed limit for large team sizes. As soon as the performance increase slows to anything less than quadratic, shirking eventually sets in and limits the possible size of the team. This implies that cooperation is sustainable in large organizational units, provided the problem‐solving processes used are powerful enough to ensure sufficient performance increases. Thus, effective problem‐solving methods are of double value, improving direct productivity and mitigating the social dilemma from team production. A manager should enlarge his or her organization up to the minimum of the limit set by the cooperation barrier and the exogenous performance limit.     

Talent management and global competition for top talent: A co‐opetition‐based perspective

In an age of competition for top talent, lateral hiring or personnel poaching has flourished not just between rivals, but also among allies transcending across national borders. This article integrates the literature on lateral hiring and co‐opetition to develop a “novel” perspective of the co‐opetition‐based view of lateral hiring. A conceptual framework was developed to account for conditions under co‐opetition setting in different markets. Contrary to the popular belief that poaching from rivals is more beneficial, the present research demonstrates that poaching from allies may be more beneficial in mitigating the “winner's curse.” Indeed, poaching in the collaboration domain is characterized by greater access to information about the target employee before job change. Lateral hiring from allies in foreign markets can also be more beneficial given the potentially moderate stigma attached compared with those from domestic markets. The implications for firms and strategic human resource management literature are examined.     

A‐pool: An agent‐oriented open system shell for distributed decision process modeling

An agent‐oriented open system shell, A‐Pool, for distributed decision process modeling in the Internet domain is presented. Unlike most decision support systems, A‐Pool provides a testbed for modeling and understanding the cognitive aspects of distributed decision processes themselves rather than for domain‐specific problem solving. This is achieved with a pool of virtual agents and a pool of cognitive maps of the agents at each A‐Pool node. The virtual agent scheme extends object‐oriented programming to the Internet domain and supports different communication and collaboration protocols with virtual communities, virtual sessions, and virtual conferences. The cognitive map scheme supports perspective sharing and various conflict integration and resolution strategies through cognitive map composition, derivation, and focus generation. Thus each A‐Pool node provides an architecture for modeling interdependencies and for ensuring global coherence; in addition, the communication is asynchronous and the control is distributed, allowing a large degree of autonomy and the examination of various thoughts and social protocols involved in strategic planning in an open system environment. Basic ideas are illustrated with a running example.     

Naming strategies as a tool for communication: application to movie titles

Abstract

Product naming is regarded as one of the most important communication decisions for firms to deliver information on their new products, particularly in the case of products with unobservable attributes, such as motion pictures, music, books, and games. Despite its importance, there has been little research on “how to name a product” as a communication decision. Hence, we propose a conceptual framework to describe naming decisions as two-stage strategic decisions. The first-stage decision involves “what kind of information to be communicated via product names,” which we call the “information choice” strategy. The second-stage decision is how to express this information through product names, which we call the “expression” strategy. We applied a two-level hierarchical Bayesian model to a data set consisting of opening weekend box-office sales, names, and release dates for 393 movies released in seven countries. Our empirical study provides useful findings on movie naming. First, the information choice for movie titles significantly impacts movies’ viewership. Second, the effects of “what to choose” depend on “how to express”. Third, significant interaction effects occur between information choice strategies and product characteristics, which implies that naming strategies depend on the product’s characteristics. One particularly noteworthy finding in this study is that although it is common sense to avoid negative wording in product names in most industries, negative content in movie titles positively impacts box-office sales.     

Designing the Supply Chain for Success at the Bottom of the Pyramid

The bottom of the pyramid—that is, the world's four billion consumers who live on $5 or less per day—is one of the last untapped markets for multinational companies (MNCs) to drive revenue and profit growth. However, most MNCs have found it difficult to make money “solving the pressing needs of low‐income communities.” We explore why the bottom of the pyramid has become a strategic focal point. We also identify and discuss fundamental differences and trade‐offs MNCs encounter in meeting the demands of the world's lowest‐income consumers. Drawing on the experience of exemplar case studies, we describe how MNCs can leverage resources to build the infrastructures needed to think differently about how to measure financial performance, design products differently to leverage both customization and standardization, and deliver differently to compensate for infrastructural deficiencies. Finally, given much of the product acceptance‐and‐profitability challenge falls under the purview of supply chain decision makers, we call for research in specific operational and relational domains to help companies design supply chain networks and processes for success at the bottom of the pyramid.     

Consumer Brand Hate: Steam rolling whatever I see

This study aims to investigate negative consumer‐brand relationships by developing a “Brand Hate” concept. A hierarchical Brand Hate model is theoretically discussed in light of the psychology and consumer behavior literatures. In Study‐I the Brand Hate concept was tested with two different types of consumer brand haters, true haters, and regular haters. The study found that in the study's proposed multidimensional Brand Hate hierarchy true haters display “Boiling Brand Hate” while regular haters reveal “Seething Brand Hate.” Two additional studies were developed to examine the relationship between consumer personality traits and Brand Hate, exploring which types of consumers are more prone to feel hatred toward targeted brands. Study‐II's findings revealed a relationship between consumers who are high in personality traits of “conscientiousness” and those who Brand Hate. Study‐III's findings indicated that “self‐confident” and “competitive” consumers might also be more prone to feel hatred toward those brands that perform poorly and unethically.     

SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO LOGISTICS,MARKETING, PRODUCTION,AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

The renaming of the Council of Logistics Management (CLM) to the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) ushered in some interesting definitional dialogue and debate within the practitioner and academic communities. Inherent in emerging definitions is the notion that SCM encompasses activities traditionally considered aspects of production, logistics, marketing, and operations management. Defining SCM in such a broad scope (i.e., a “within” and “across” functions perspective), while considered by many scholars as the true representation of the essence of SCM, creates confusion regarding the appropriate organizational level within a business that is best suited for managerial decision making regarding the phenomenon. This paper contributes to the emerging SCM dialogue by highlighting the functional spaces (the “within” function perspective), relationships, and conceptual overlaps (the “across” functions perspective) between marketing, logistics, production, operations, and supply chain management. By comparing and contrasting the literature‐based conceptual boundaries of each discipline, a framework is proposed that more clearly captures the essence of the SCM decision making sphere. Managerial insights and future research implications are presented.     

Ethical decision‐making in Islamic financial institutions in light of Maqasid Al‐Sharia: A conceptual framework

This article develops a conceptual framework for ethical decision‐making in Islamic financial institution based on the Islamic methodological approaches on ethics. While making use of the similarities between the scientific method and the Islamic jurisprudence method, a framework is developed by means of argumentation and reasoning to integrate Sharia doctrines with the “plan, do, check and act” (PDCA) cycle as a managerial tool. Using Al‐Raysuni's analysis of Al‐Shatibi's work on maqasid al‐sharia, this article develops a framework to assess the ethical aspects of Islamic financial operations, which is then applied to hypothetical cases. This approach can help overcome the methodological deficiencies in measuring ethical performance in Islamic finance by focusing on the process of ethical decision‐making that leads to the outcomes of organizational behavior beyond legality of contracts. The framework outlines the conditions under which an activity that is considered legal and permissible contractually could lead to outcomes that can make it ethical or unethical.     

Online Purchase Intentions: An Empirical Testing of a Multiple-Theory Model

Manufacturing is a complex application domain, traditionally a realm of engineers and factory workers. As we are in the information age, the manufacturing domain has become more dependent on information through the use of computers and computer‐controlled machines. In the arena of advanced manufacturing, a number of concepts such as the “virtual corporation”; and “virtual factory”; have emerged, requiring that manufacturing be highly information‐intensive and knowledge‐based.

This article examines the role of the information infrastructure and explores the use of intelligent agents in its implementation for advanced manufacturing enterprises. The information infrastructure forms a complex hierarchy of distributed, heterogeneous information systems. Intelligent agents play various roles at different levels of the hierarchy to provide interoperability, reliability, programma‐bility, and controllability.     

Communication costs in the performance of unrelated tasks: Continuum models and finite models

We consider two two‐person organizations, called A and B. Each organization faces a changing environment; an environment has two components and each of them is privately observed by one of the organization's two members. Each organization's task is to respond to the current environment by taking a correct action; the correct action is a known function of the environment. However, the task of A is totally unrelated to the task of B: if A knew B's current environment and B's current correct action, that would tell A nothing at all about its own current correct action (and vice versa). Now suppose that each organization performs its task by a sequence of message announcements that stop when an “action‐taker”; has just enough information about the two members’ private observations so that he can take the correct action. Suppose we measure the effort this requires by the size of the set of possible message announcements. Then a compelling conjecture says that there can be no saving in total effort if we merge the two organizations into a single four‐person organization in which a single action‐taker takes both actions.

The conjecture turns out to be true when the possible messages form a continuum whose size is measured by its dimension, provided the message‐announcing procedure obeys suitable regularity conditions. When we turn to a model in which the number of possible messages is finite, the situation is different. While a certain general proposition about coverings and projections is the main tool in proving the “continuum”; conjecture, the finite analog of that proposition is (surprisingly) false. The finite version of the conjecture holds, on the other hand, when one adds a certain regularity requirement ("contiguity") to the message‐announcement procedure. The truth of the finite conjecture without such a requirement remains open.     

An Integrated System to Acquire Knowledge and Support Decisions in Complex Innovation Design Processes

A system that integrates tools from different disciplines, ranging from cognitive and social psychology to multicriteria analysis and mathematical programming, is introduced to cope with the complexities and uncertainties that generate criticality in the organization innovation processes. An intelligent combined use of tools can facilitate the integration of unstructured or semistructured information resources and support individuals or groups of stakeholders in a complex environment, in order to structure a problem situation, to agree on a “problem focus” and to make commitments on a set of possible actions. The purpose of this article is to examine the potentiality of this system, above all in terms of knowledge acquisition, fusion, and use in various organizational contexts, and to describe an application in relation to an industrial project, in order to support the conceptual phase of the design process.     

A NOTE ON THE QUANTILE FORMULATION

Many investment models in discrete or continuous‐time settings boil down to maximizing an objective of the quantile function of the decision variable. This quantile optimization problem is known as the quantile formulation of the original investment problem. Under certain monotonicity assumptions, several schemes to solve such quantile optimization problems have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we propose a change‐of‐variable and relaxation method to solve the quantile optimization problems without using the calculus of variations or making any monotonicity assumptions. The method is demonstrated through a portfolio choice problem under rank‐dependent utility theory (RDUT). We show that this problem is equivalent to a classical Merton's portfolio choice problem under expected utility theory with the same utility function but a different pricing kernel explicitly determined by the given pricing kernel and probability weighting function. With this result, the feasibility, well‐posedness, attainability, and uniqueness issues for the portfolio choice problem under RDUT are solved. It is also shown that solving functional optimization problems may reduce to solving probabilistic optimization problems. The method is applicable to general models with law‐invariant preference measures including portfolio choice models under cumulative prospect theory (CPT) or RDUT, Yaari's dual model, Lopes' SP/A model, and optimal stopping models under CPT or RDUT.     

Marketing performance assessment and accountability: Process and outcomes

Marketing accountability, and how it may be achieved via performance assessment and metrics, have been central topics in both the marketing literature and practice (Katsikeas et al. 2016). Recent developments in digital channels, the accompanying explosion of data and emergence of marketing automation, the globalization of markets, and the rise of customer experience as a key firm priority have further magnified interest in and the importance of understanding how potential marketing outcomes are and can be achieved (CMO Survey, 2021; Mintz et al., 2021). As a result, gaining clarity on how to design and manage performance assessment systems to deal with these issues has never been more important. This paper argues that further progress in this research domain requires a deep understanding of the marketing performance assessment (MPA) process to provide both a catalyst and foundation for the next generation of research. Although there has been considerable research in the areas of marketing metrics and marketing accountability, much less attention has been paid to the MPA process that links them. Yet, the MPA process is essential to successful marketing management. To address this, we first review past research in this broad domain to answer the “Where have we been?” question that identifies theneed for a new conceptual model. Second, drawing on research findings both within the broad MPA domain and allied areas within and outside of marketing, we develop and detail a new conceptual model of the MPA process and use it to identify what really needs to be known but is currently unclear in this domain (i.e., “Where do we need to go?”). Third, we suggest how these areas of needed inquiry may best be investigated (i.e., “How do we get there?”) by identifying new perspectives, theories, data sources, and analysis approaches that may be productively employed in future research.     

What: An argumentative groupware approach for organizing and documenting research activities

The topic of this paper is a process‐vs.‐product design method representation called Argumentative Writing (AW). Argumentative writing is a multi‐representation approach for conducting and reporting research projects. AW has at least two representations: one for structuring the problem‐understanding/solving process and one for communicating its product to others. We discuss WHAT, a hypertext‐based tool for AW. In WHAT (Writing with a Hypermedia‐based Argumentative Tool), the design process is captured using Rittel's Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS) method (Conklin, 1988; Hashim, 1990a; Rittel, 1980). The product of the design process is represented in WHAT using a general document‐representation scheme. In the Introduction we raise four major issues that we explore in the rest of the paper. Also in the Introduction, we show the impact the WHAT approach can have on organizational computing applications such as business education and training (Hashim, Rathnam, & Whinston, 1991) and the design of dialectical organizational information systems. The section “A Methodological Basis for AW Tools”; deals with the rationale behind choosing the IBIS method in capturing the design process. The section after that explains WHAT, and the section following it explores its use as a groupware tool. The applicability of WHAT and its pros and cons are discussed in two separate sections. In the Conclusion we outline the potentiality of the approach and present suggestions for its further development. Since our first reporting on WHAT (Hashim, 1990b), the AW approach was found applicable to educational, scientific, and business areas. One such application is for structuring case discussions in business schools (Hashim et al., 1991).     

Food,literature, art,and the demise of dualistic thought

In the early 1990s philosopher Deane Curtin proposed a “food‐centered philosophy of human being,” whereby food became a potential site for the elimination of the self/other duality so central to Western thought. Since food is ingested and becomes part of the self, it obliges us to reconceptualize not only the other but also the identity of a self that is so permeable, it can physically incorporate the other. Food/cooking/eating as a conceptual complex has further challenged the self/other dichotomy in barrier‐breaking new cultural artifacts such as “food books,” performance art pieces, and popular film.     

Mapping the consumer‐subject in advertising

Traditionally marketing communication‐or more specifically advertising‐has been framed in terms of products/ services, needs and wants of consumers as if these were real givens, existing independently of the forms and acts of marketing communication itself. From this perspective, advertising is merely seen as a purveyor of information about products/services/needs between producers and consumers but hardly as actively implicated in shaping, not only the relation between the processes of production and those of consumption, but also the conception of the consumer‐subject. This paper makes a brief diachronic account of advertising with a view to highlighting how the consumer‐subject is represented. Whereas early advertising conceives of the consumer‐subject as a “rational” decision‐maker, aware of its needs and desire, more recent advertising constitutes the consumer‐subject in a hyperreal, dream‐like world, which seduces and spellbinds it.     

Trust and the don't‐want‐to‐complain bias in peer‐to‐peer platform markets

This paper addresses peer‐to‐peer (P2P) digital platform markets, often associated with the “sharing economy” or the “collaborative economy”. Such digital platforms, facilitating new purchasing channels for consumers by matching P2P supply and demand, can be considered new market places challenging the conventional markets. How are P2P platform markets evaluated by the consumers? Based on a comprehensive survey‐data material, five different P2P service markets are considered by peer buyers and the results compared to consumers’ evaluations from similar conventional service markets according to trust, comparability and consumers’ satisfaction with the transactions. Comparability seems to be one advantage for the platform markets, while trust could become a problem. Conditions for trust in P2P platform markets is particularly interesting to study because contrary to conventional markets P2P transactions cannot rely on governmental laws, regulations and security net. This trust problem has been solved by a trust‐generating rate and review system. Our data material, however, distinguishes a mechanism that we have coined as the don't‐want‐to‐complain bias. More precisely, people do not like to complain, hence buyers of P2P services often hesitate to give negative ratings when they are discontent with a service or a supplier. Therefore, positive ratings become overestimated. If consumers recognize this bias, ratings and reviews will lose credibility and no longer be considered trustworthy. Eventually, this may threaten the well‐functioning of P2P markets.     

The Eyes Have It: How a Car's Face Influences Consumer Categorization and Evaluation of Product Line Extensions

This research focuses on a previously unexamined risk associated with the widely used new product development strategy of line extensions. Specifically, it explores consumer reactions when line extensions become too visually similar and examines both short‐term and longer term strategies for solving the problem. Examined in the context of consumer durables, specifically, automobiles, the results show that consumers who make categorization mistakes when trying to distinguish between two visually similar product lines have more negative attitudes not only toward the product but also toward the parent brand. The results of Study 1 confirm that providing a design vocabulary that articulates the car's design features is effective in reducing consumer's categorization mistakes. In addition, results of Study 2 indicate that changes to the car's “eyes” (headlights) are more effective than changes to the car's “mouth” (grille) in helping consumers to differentiate among cars in the line.