Identifying Tiers of Influence in Expert Systems Research: II

In the first part of this study we described an objective, multifaceted, citation-based methodology for assessing journal influence. We applied it to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) to gauge the most influential journals for AI research. In this paper we apply the same methodology to a broadened citation base drawn from journals devoted to expert systems (ES), as well as those with a broader AI editorial scope. The result is a pair of journal tiers that reflect the special emphasis that expert system research has among AI researchers in business schools. Taken together, the AI/ES findings reported here coupled with the general AI tiers identified in Part I provide a fairly complete and insightful picture of the most influential journals impacting AI in general, and AI/ES in particular.     

Potential cost savings of frequent flyer miles for business travel

The mileage redemption strategy is a procedure used by many business firms to reduce air travel costs, in which the frequent flyer miles of traveling employees accumulated during business trips are applied to their future business trips to obtain “free” air tickets. This paper presents a framework that investigates how the frequent flyer miles can be used in the most effective way to reduce air travel costs by those firms that are either using the mileage redemption strategy or considering the use of the strategy. The framework can be implemented quite easily by a spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel.     

Effects of Experience-based Work Patterns in a GSS Environment

Existing group support system (GSS) research has focused on the impacts of GSSs on conventional group-work patterns. Few studies have examined the effects of different group-work patterns in a GSS environment. Specifically, we are interested in group-work patterns that vary in terms of group members' experience or ability levels. In this paper, we report on an exploratory experiment designed to compare the effects of three distinct experience-based work patterns on group decision quality, efficiency, and participant satisfaction in the case of GSS usage. There is the conventional work pattern in which persons of differing experience levels work simultaneously in a meeting. An alternative pattern consists of experienced participants working on a problem first and then passing their results on to less experienced participants. Yet another pattern reverses this sequence. Our results show that while groups in the conventional work pattern are more efficient in considering alternative solutions, groups organized in the other two experience-based work patterns can produce higher quality solutions. We observed no significant differences in participant satisfaction among the three group-work patterns. These findings suggest that a GSS can be as effective (or even more effective) with alternative group-work patterns as it is with the conventional pattern.