User,Use & Utility Research

Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) is at a turning point. Planning, designing, developing and operating IT used to be a management task of a few elites in public ad-ministrations and corporations. But the continuous digitization of nearly all areas of life changes the IT landscape fundamentally. Success in this new era requires putting the human perspective – the digital user – at the very heart of the new digitized service-led economy. BISE faces not just a temporary trend but a complex socio-technical phenomenon with far-reaching implications. The challenges are manifold and have major consequences for all stakeholders, both in information systems and management research as well as in practice. Corporate processes have to be re-designed from the ground up, starting with the user’s perspective, thus putting usage experience and utility of the individual center stage. The digital service economy leads to highly personalized application systems while organizational functions are being fragmented. Entirely new ways of interacting with information systems, in particular beyond desktop IT, are being invented and established. These fundamental challenges require novel approaches with regards to innovation and development methods as well as adequate concepts for enterprise or service system architectures. Gigantic amounts of data are being generated at an accelerating rate by an increasing number of devices – data that need to be managed. In order to tackle these extraordinary challenges we introduce ‘user, use & utility’ as a new field of BISE that focuses primarily on the digital user, his or her usage behavior and the utility associated with system usage in the digitized service-led economy. The research objectives encompass the development of theories, methods and tools for systematic requirement elicitation, systems design, and business development for successful Business and Information Systems Engineering in a digitized economy – information systems that digital users enjoy using. This challenge calls for leveraging insights from various scientific disciplines such as Design, Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology and Sociology. BISE can provide an integrated perspective, thereby assuming a pivotal role within the digitized service led economy.     

Dynamic specification of consumer expenditure on non-durables and services in Austria

Zusammenfassung Jüngste Fortschritte in der ökonometrischen Theorie führten zu erneutem Interesse an einem der am häufigsten analysierten Themenkreise der quantitativen Ökonomie: dem Zusammenhang zwischen Konsumausgaben und verfügbaren Einkommen. Entsprechende Tests ergaben, daß die Konsumausgaben für nichtdauerhafte Güter und Dienstleistungen und das verfügbare Einkommen kointegriert sind. Ausgehend von dieser Tatsache wurde in mehreren Schritten eine Konsumfunktion abgeleitet, die neben zufriedenstellenden statistischen Eigenschaften eine plausible ökonomische Interpretation zuläßt und eine interessante, mit den beobachteten Daten konsistente dynamische Struktur aufweist.

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Helpful suggestions for improvement by M. Deistler, D. F. Hendry, and J. Wolters are gratefully acknowledged.     

Marion G. Müller,International University Bremen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Kommentar zu Beiers Beitrag

Ohne ZusammenfassungGerhard Scherhorn ist Professor für Konsumtheorie und Verbraucherpolitik an der Universität Hohenheim, Postfach 106, D-7000 Stuttgart 70.     

Gernot Wersig 60 Jahre

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The goal of consumer advice: Transparency or autonomy?

To improve the transparency of consumer markets by means of information is an important task but it cannot be served efficiently by consumer advice. The genuine aim of consumer advice is described here as promoting consumer autonomy by, first, decision counselling and related means and, second, coordinating consumer interests. The paper is centred on two main issues: the responsibility of suppliers of consumer goods to meet the consumers' information needs, and the potential and chance for consumers to progress towards a higher degree of autonomy.     

Contribution of financial market segments at different stages of development: Transition,cohesion and mature economies compared

What is the impact of financial sector segments at different stages of development? We apply a production function approach to investigate the impact of the credit, bond and stock segments in nine EU-accession countries over early years of transition (1996–2000) and compare these to mature market economies and to countries at intermediate stage. We find that the transfer mechanisms differ over the development cycle (from bond markets to educational attainment to labor participation) and that financial market segments with links to the public sector (but not stock markets) contributed to stability and growth in transition economies.     

Innovations in the international financial markets

The appearance of the international financial markets is changing rapidly; new instruments are constantly being hatched and marketed, often with considerable success. However, the ingenuity of the markets does not always meet with applause; the banking supervisory authorities and central banks view the rapid pace of innovation with concern and the banking community also displays occasional unease. On balance, do the positive aspects outweigh the negative ones?