Social influence in technology adoption: taking stock and moving forward

Social influence has been shown to profoundly affect human behavior in general and technology adoption in particular. Over time, multiple definitions and measures of social influence have been introduced to the field of technology adoption research, contributing to an increasingly fragmented landscape of constructs that challenges the conceptual integrity of the field. Consequently, this paper sets out to review how social influence has been conceptualized in technology adoption research. In so doing, this paper attempts to inform researchers’ understanding of the construct, reconcile its myriad conceptualizations, constructively challenge extant approaches, and provide impulses for future research. A systematic review of the salient literature uncovers that extant interpretations of social influence are (1) predominantly compliance-based and as such risk overlooking identification- and internalization-based effects; (2) primarily targeted at the individual level and non-social technologies, thereby precluding the impact of socially enriched environments; and (3) heavily reliant on survey-based and US/China-centric samples, which jeopardizes the generalizability and predictive validity of the findings. Building upon these insights, this paper develops an integrated perspective on social influence in technology adoption research that encourages scholars to pursue a multi-theoretical understanding of social influence at the interface of users, social referents, and technology.     

Worker visibility and firms' retention policies

In the last two decades, the widespread use of web‐based social networks has led to a higher visibility of workers to the labor market. We theoretically and experimentally analyze the consequences of such increased labor market transparency for the efficiency of job assignments, the wages of workers, and firm profits. Our theoretical results show that higher visibility of workers increases the efficiency of job assignments, leads to a redistribution of income between workers of different ability, and increases overall surplus. Our experimental findings generally support the theoretical results with the exception that increased visibility leads to higher worker turnover such that surplus does not increase.     

Does the paradox of plenty exist? Experimental evidence on the curse of resource abundance

There is conflicting evidence about whether abundant resources are indeed a blessing or a curse. We make use of specially designed economic experiments to investigate how resource abundance affects cooperation in the absence or presence of regulatory institutions. We observe that in the absence of regulatory institutions, there is less cooperation in groups with access to large resource pools than in groups with access to small resource pools. However, if regulatory institutions are present, we show that there is more cooperation in groups with access to large resource pools than in groups with access to small resource pools. Our findings also reveal that resource users are more willing to regulate access to abundant than to small resource pools. These findings provide causal evidence for the “paradox of plenty” and identify the causes for the pitfalls and potentials of resource wealth.     

An introduction to the economics of immigration in OECD countries

The share of the foreign-born population in member countries of the OECD is increasing, and this article summarizes economics research on the effects of immigration in those nations. Four broad topics are addressed: labour market issues, fiscal questions, the political economy of immigration, and productivity and international trade. Extreme concerns about deleterious labour market and fiscal impacts following from new immigrants are not found to be warranted. However, it is also clear that government policies and practices regarding the selection and integration of new migrants affect labour market, fiscal, social and cultural outcomes. Policies that are well informed, well crafted and well executed beneficially improve population welfare.     

Accreditation in regulated markets

We study firms that supply a vertically and horizontally differentiated service in a market with regulated prices. The incentives for seeking accreditation are more significant for sellers of below-average quality services relative to sellers of above-average quality services. For homogenous firms, profits are lower in equilibria where both firms seek accreditation relatively to equilibria where neither does. Private and social accreditation incentives typically differ. The welfare optimal reimbursement rate is independent of a firm's actual accreditation decision but dependent on the accreditation decision of the rival. Hence, policies that give extra financial support to firms that accredit are likely to promote inefficiency.     

Are intraday reversal and momentum trading strategies feasible? An analysis for German blue chip stocks

The success of trading strategies that lead to abnormal excess returns based on annual/monthly investment periods has recently declined significantly. We adopt the original frameworks of De Bondt and Thaler (J Finance 40(3):793–808, 1985) and Jegadeesh and Titman (J Finance 48(1):65–91, 1993) to an intraday reversal as well as momentum strategy scheme based on 5-min stock returns. We analyze 16 reversal and momentum strategies each with ranking and holding periods of 60, 120, 180 or 300 min (reversal strategies) and 15, 30, 45 or 60 min (momentum strategies) from a retail investor’s perspective. We find no indications for momentum in stock prices but strong indications for reversals. Our results are furtherly robust regarding to market adjustment, portfolio sizes and skipping periods between ranking and holding periods. Our results show that the returns of the reversal strategies are statistically significant, however, yet too small to be economically significant. Our results also confirm the efficiency on the stock markets.

     

Strategic analysis of providing corporate sustainability open data

How companies report their data is undergoing digitization and sustainable transformation. Sustainability is important; therefore, various stakeholders are interested in sustainability information. Companies provide the required information and strive toward the use of information systems to ensure efficient data processing. A possible approach for information provision is open data. This research introduces the idea of corporate sustainability open data (CSOD) as one new mechanism of companies' sustainability self-reporting. Since CSOD is not yet commonly practiced by companies, a strategic analysis of the situation and its possible consequences is conducted with an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This research provides an overview of companies' sustainable development through open data. Moreover, it identifies drivers, challenges, and reasonable strategies for CSOD adoption. Thus, the research contributes to the establishment of an innovative application of open data in the private sector to support sustainable transformation worldwide.     

More on parametric characterizations of risk aversion and prudence

Summary. This note provides an alternative proof for the equivalence of decreasing absolute prudence (DAP) in the expected utility framework and in a two-parametric approach where utility is a function of the mean and the standard deviation. In addition, we elucidate that the equivalence of DAP and the concavity of utility as a function of mean and variance, which was shown to hold for normally distributed stochastics in Lajeri and Nielsen [4], cannot be generalized. Received: November 27, 2000; revised version: November 26, 2001 Correspondence to: T. Eichner