Information Sharing in Contests

We study the incentives to share private information ahead of contests, such as markets with promotional competition, procurement contests, or research and development (R&D). We consider the cases where firms have (i) independent values and (ii) common values of winning the contest. In both cases, when decisions to share information are made independently, sharing information is strictly dominated. With independent values, an industry‐wide agreement to share information can arise in equilibrium. Expected effort is lower with than without information sharing. With common values, an industry‐wide agreement to share information never arises in equilibrium. Expected effort is higher with than without information sharing.     

Organizational identification as a determinant of customer orientation in service organizations

The marketing literature suggests that frontline employees are the central determinant of how customer-oriented a service organization is perceived to be by its customers. However, little is known about the contingencies of employees’ customer orientation (CO) beyond personality traits and broadly construed work attitudes. Based on the social identity approach, the present article develops a multilevel model whereby CO is the result of identity-based management of frontline employees. Two empirical studies in the travel industry show that employees’ CO depends on employees’ organizational identification and their leaders’ acting as role models of CO.     

Index der wahrgenommenen Inflation oder EU-Verbraucherumfragen?

Nach der Euro-Umstellung Anfang 2002 entwickelte sich das Preisempfinden deutlich anders als der gemessene Verbraucherpreisindex. Inwieweit wird auch heute noch die Preisentwicklung von den Konsumenten übersch?tzt? Wie zuverl?ssig misst der von Hans Wolfgang Brachinger entwickelte „Index der wahrgenommenen Inflation“ dieses Ph?nomen? Zu welchen Ergebnissen kommen die von der EU-Kommission beauftragten Verbraucherumfragen? Die Verfasser geben ihre pers?nliche Auffassung wieder, die nicht unbedingt mit derjenigen der Deutschen Bundesbank übereinstimmen muss.     

Looking at Consumer Behavior in a Moral Perspective

The paper suggests that consumers and their behaviors deserve (much) more attention in our field. After a few website references (about ethical shopping and ethical trade initiatives) and after a brief literature review of recent business ethics and consumer behavior literature conceptual frameworks are suggested. As an open end, the paper contains some empirical references, related to consumer honesty, tax loyalty and to motives for buying organic food, and suggests the development of a consumer morality measurement instrument.     

Understanding Insurance Customer Dishonesty: Outline of a Situational Approach

The paper takes a look at insurance customer dishonesty as a special case of consumer ethics, understood as a way of situation handling, as a moral choice between right and wrong, such as between self-interest vs. common-interest, in other words, a “moral temptation”. After briefly raising the question if different schools, of moral philosophy would conceptualize such moral temptations differently, the paper presents ‘moral psychology’ as a frame of reference, with a focus on cognitive moral development, moral attitude and moral neutralization. Conceptualization questions can’t be answered finally without thinking at the same time of empirical research design and instrument design decisions, e.g. choosing between experiment vs. questionnaire studies, designing suitable moral temptation situations as an experiment vs. questionnaires with scenario vignettes. The paper discusses then experiences from a 2004 pilot survey, with a main focus on a few insurance dishonesty scenarios with follow-up questions. The paper has an open end, i.e. outlines desirable future theoretical, empirical and practical work with insurance customer dishonesty.     

Exporting raises productivity in sub-Saharan African manufacturing firms

Proponents of trade liberalization argue that exporting helps firms to achieve higher productivity levels. This hypothesis is examined for a panel of manufacturing firms in nine African countries. The results indicate that exporters in these countries are more productive and, more importantly, exporters increase their productivity advantage after entry into the export market. While the first finding can be explained by selection-only the most productive firms engage in exporting-the latter cannot. The results are robust when unobserved productivity differences and self-selection into the export market are controlled for using different econometric methods. Scale economies are shown to be an important channel for the productivity advance. Credit constraints and contract enforcement problems prevent firms that only produce for the domestic market from fully exploiting scale economies.     

The Interplay of Communication and Decisions in Electronic Negotiations: Communicative Decisions or Decisive Communication?

Whilst much research has been conducted on decision support for electronic negotiations and some research has been done on communication support in this area, there is a lack of research on the interplay between these two elements of negotiations. The questions whether both are equally important, whether one effects the other, or whether they show counter-effects are important both for negotiation training (i.e. what should be the focus for becoming a good negotiator) and for system research (i.e. which system support elements need to be developed). The current paper presents results of a controlled laboratory experiment with negotiators that were provided with decision support and communication support and negotiators that had only communication support available. The impact of decision support on the communication process and on outcome dimensions as well as the impact of communication behaviour on the negotiation process and the qualitative dimensions of the outcome will be discussed.     

Information Systems for “Wicked Problems”

The objective of this commentary is to propose fruitful research directions built upon the reciprocal interplay of social media and collective intelligence. We focus on “wicked problems” – a class of problems that Introne et al. (Künstl. Intell. 27:45–52, 2013) call “problems for which no single computational formulation of the problem is sufficient, for which different stakeholders do not even agree on what the problem really is, and for which there are no right or wrong answers, only answers that are better or worse from different points of view”. We argue that information systems research in particular can aid in designing appropriate systems due to benefits derived from the combined perspectives of both social media and collective intelligence. We document the relevance and timeliness of social media and collective intelligence for business and information systems engineering, pinpoint needed functionality of information systems for wicked problems, describe related research challenges, highlight prospective suitable methods to tackle those challenges, and review examples of initial results.