Jan Krämer

Network Neutrality and Congestion Sensitive Content Providers: Implications for Content Variety, Broadband Investment, and Regulation

We study departures from network neutrality through implementing a quality of service tiering regime in which an Internet service provider charges for prioritization on a nondiscriminatory basis. We find that quality of service tiering may be more efficient in the short run because it better allocates the existing network capacity and in the long run because it provides higher investment incentives due to the increased demand for priority services by the entry of new congestion sensitive content providers. Which network regime is the most efficient depends on the distribution of congestion sensitivity among content providers, but a guideline is that the regime that provides higher incentives for infrastructure investments is more efficient in the long run.

Understanding auction fever: a framework for emotional bidding

Auction fever is a multifaceted phenomenon that is frequently observed in both traditional and Internet auctions. In order to gain a better understanding of its causes, we develop a conceptual framework to analyze emotions in auctions, which is based on an exhaustive literature review. The framework integrates rational calculus with emotional aspects and suggests that emotional processing is triggered at three different stages of an auction: First, the economic environment can affect a bidder’s level of perceived competition and thus influence the bidding strategy prior to the auction. Second, auction events may have ramifications on the bidder’s emotional state during the auction due to previous investments or perceived ownership. Third, past auction outcomes may impact future bidding behavior through emotions such as the joy of winning or loser regret. Auction fever, eventually, is a phenomenon that results from the interplay of these emotional processes and causes a bidder to deviate from an initially chosen bidding strategy.

Co-Investments and Tacit Collusion in Regulated Network Industries: Experimental Evidence

Several regulatory authorities have recently allowed competing network operators to co-invest in network infrastructure. With the use of a laboratory experiment, we investigate the impact of co-investments on competition in regulated network industries, particularly in comparison to unilateral and duplicate investments. Our main finding is that co-investment (i.e. cooperation at the infrastructure level) facilitates tacit collusion (i.e. cooperation at the retail level) significantly, which questions the positive evaluation of co-investments with respect to consumers’ surplus in the theoretical literature.

Bundling vertically differentiated communications services to leverage market power

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and how bundling services may achieve leverage of market power from the telcos home to a secondary service market (e.g. video broadcasting). Despite digital convergence, in many countries the former telco monopolist remains to hold significant market power in its home market for telecommunication services.Design/methodology/approach – To this extent the author considers a formal game‐theoretic model where the telco firm holds a monopoly in the market for telecommunications services, while competing with a cable firm in the market for video broadcasting services. Services may differ in quality. For the firms, the provision of high‐quality services is more costly than the provision of low‐quality services. Conversely, consumers have a greater reservation price for higher service qualities. Therefore firms face a trade off between revenues and cost when selecting the optimal service quality.Findings – The model shows that the telco firm can achie...

Theories in Business and Information Systems Engineering

Even though the idea of science enjoys an impressive reputation, there seems to be no precise conception of science. On the one hand, there is no unified definition of the extension of activities subsumed under the notion of science. According to the narrow conception that is common in Anglo-Saxon countries, science is restricted to those disciplines that investigate nature and aim at explanation and prediction of natural phenomena. A wider conception that can be found in various European countries includes social sciences, the humanities and engineering. On the other hand and related to the first aspect, there is still no general consensus on the specific characteristics of scientific discoveries and scientific knowledge.

Towards a User-Centered Feedback Design for Smart Meter Interfaces to Support Efficient Energy-Use Choices

Based on interviews of users’ experience with current smart-meter technologies the authors propose, implement and evaluate a user-centered design of an energy-use information system that assists private households in making efficient energy consumption decisions. Instead of providing disaggregated data, the envisioned system automatically calculates the monetary savings from replacing an appliance or by changing the operational behavior of an appliance. The information provided is personalized with respect to appliance use and also comprises information from external databases. A prototype is implemented and evaluated in a use case with white goods household appliances. The study concludes with directions for further interactivity improvements and research into the structures of an openly shared appliance database.

When ‘Just’ is Just Not Enough

Although Internet service providers (ISPs) are technically capable as well as legally allowed to offer non-neutral Internet access services, where the data flows of customers who pay a premium are prioritized over others, such an access service is currently not offered by ISPs. We argue that ISPs are hesitant to tap the price discrimination potential of prioritized Internet access services, because in the context of the ongoing public debate on net neutrality (NN), their customers would consider such differentiation unjust. In a representative survey among German Internet access customers, we find that the customers’ perceptions of justice as well as the framing of the mechanism by which prioritized Internet access is provided are indeed decisive for whether customers would prefer this access regime over NN. In particular, we find that perceptions of distributive and procedural justice influence customers’ choice for non-neutral Internet access. Moreover, customers are more likely to accept a regime that offers an absolute rather than a relative prioritization of data flows.

Research Commentary—From Net Neutrality to Data Neutrality: A Techno-Economic Framework and Research Agenda

The Internet has assumed a central role in the global economy facilitating commerce and communication and is thus central to many areas of information systems (IS) research. In particular, IS researchers played a critical role in the academic discourse on net neutrality, which has recently informed new regulatory frameworks in the United States and Europe. We discuss and categorize the various issues and key trade-offs that are still being debated in the context of net neutrality and identify open research questions in this domain. Based on these insights, we argue that net neutrality, which is concerned with a gatekeeper at the infrastructure level, may just be part of a larger debate on data neutrality where the gatekeeper may rather control a software platform. We provide several examples of potential data neutrality issues and generalize the key trade-offs in the context of a proposed four-step framework for identifying and organizing promising areas of IS research on data neutrality.

Margin squeeze regulation and infrastructure competition

Abstract We investigate margin squeeze regulation in a market with infrastructure competition. To this end, we consider two integrated firms and one non-integrated retailer that compete in a horizontally differentiated retail market. The non-integrated firm relies on wholesale access provided by one of the integrated firms. Throughout several model variants we find that margin squeeze regulation lowers consumers’ surplus. In reverse, firms are likely to benefit from margin squeeze regulation, because it leads to higher retail prices or facilitates tacit collusion. From a total welfare perspective, margin squeeze regulation is only beneficial if it prevents foreclosure of the retailer, but even then, this is due to increased industry profits and at the expense of consumers’ surplus. These results question current European policy initiatives to augment the role of ex ante margin squeeze tests in sector-specific regulation.

Data-driven innovations in electronic markets

For more than 25 years now, Electronic Markets (EM) has published papers in the field of networked business and electronic commerce. The editors see the scope and merit of the journal in its recognition of Bthe transformational role of information and communication technology (IT) in changing the interaction between organizations and customers^ (http://www.electronicmarkets.org/about-em/ scope/). In the early years of the journal, this transformation was predominantly driven by the increasing availability of the internet, which allowed networked-driven business innovations to emerge. Today, recent advances in the capabilities to store and analyze the wealth of data that is created by network business have become the transformational engine pushing the industry towards more data-driven innovations (Alt and Zimmermann 2014). Not surprisingly, the journal has recently addressed this development by dedicated special issues and papers, such as the special issue on BBig Data Analytics and Electronic Markets^ (Volume 27, Issue 3, 2017). Following this trend, the current special issue includes four papers representing current research on Bdata-driven innovations in electronic markets^ that are located at the interface between networked business and business analytics. The papers in this special issue have originally been submitted to the 13th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI 2017) BTowards Thought Leadership in Digital Transformation^ in St. Gallen, Switzerland, the majority of them to the Track BData Science & Business Analytics^. In total 35 manuscripts were submitted to the track, out of which 13 papers were accepted after revision. Selected, high quality papers of this track and some authors of other tracks with topics related to Bdata-driven innovations in electronic markets^ were invited to submit an extended and revised version for this special issue. This also included the paper BIs paid search overrated?^ by Daniel Schlangenotto and Dennis Kundisch, which has received the WI 2017 best paper award. We could finally accept four papers that are presented in the issue at hand. In this context, we would like to thank all reviewers and authors as well as the editors of Electronic Markets. Without their support and contributions this special issue would not have been possible.