Manish Agrawal

A Behavioral Model of Digital Music Piracy

The increasing pervasiveness of the Internet, broadband connections, and the emergence of digital compression technologies have dramatically changed the face of digital music. Digitally compressed music files are essentially a perfect public economic good, and illegal copying of these files has increasingly become rampant. In this article, we present a study on the behavioral dynamics that impact the piracy of digital audio files and provide a contrast with software piracy. Our results indicate that the general ethical model of software piracy is broadly applicable to audio piracy. However, significant enough differences with software underscore the unique dynamics of audio piracy. We highlight practical implications that can help the recording industry to effectively combat piracy and provide future research directions.

Community intelligence and social media services: a rumor theoretic analysis of tweets during social crises

Recent extreme events show that Twitter, a micro-blogging service, is emerging as the dominant social reporting tool to spread information on social crises. It is elevating the online public community to the status of first responders who can collectively cope with social crises. However, at the same time, many warnings have been raised about the reliability of community intelligence obtained through social reporting by the amateur online community. Using rumor theory, this paper studies citizen-driven information processing through Twitter services using data from three social crises: the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008, the Toyota recall in 2010, and the Seattle cafe shooting incident in 2012. We approach social crises as communal efforts for community intelligence gathering and collective information processing to cope with and adapt to uncertain external situations. We explore two issues: (1) collective social reporting as an information processing mechanism to address crisis problems and gather community intelligence, and (2) the degeneration of social reporting into collective rumor mills. Our analysis reveals that information with no clear source provided was the most important, personal involvement next in importance, and anxiety the least yet still important rumor causing factor on Twitter under social crisis situations.

Software Effort, Quality, and Cycle Time: A Study of CMM Level 5 Projects

The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) has become a popular methodology for improving software development processes with the goal of developing high-quality software within budget and planned cycle time. Prior research literature, while not exclusively focusing on CMM level 5 projects, has identified a host of factors as determinants of software development effort, quality, and cycle time. In this study, we focus exclusively on CMM level 5 projects from multiple organizations to study the impacts of highly mature processes on effort, quality, and cycle time. Using a linear regression model based on data collected from 37 CMM level 5 projects of four organizations, we find that high levels of process maturity, as indicated by CMM level 5 rating, reduce the effects of most factors that were previously believed to impact software development effort, quality, and cycle time. The only factor found to be significant in determining effort, cycle time, and quality was software size. On the average, the developed models predicted effort and cycle time around 12 percent and defects to about 49 percent of the actuals, across organizations. Overall, the results in this paper indicate that some of the biggest rewards from high levels of process maturity come from the reduction in variance of software development outcomes that were caused by factors other than software size

Information control and terrorism: Tracking the Mumbai terrorist attack through twitter

This paper analyzes the role of situational information as an antecedent of terrorists’ opportunistic decision making in the volatile and extreme environment of the Mumbai terrorist attack. We especially focus on how Mumbai terrorists monitored and utilized situational information to mount attacks against civilians. Situational information which was broadcast through live media and Twitter contributed to the terrorists’ decision making process and, as a result, increased the effectiveness of hand-held weapons to accomplish their terrorist goal. By utilizing a framework drawn from Situation Awareness (SA) theory, this paper aims to (1) analyze the content of Twitter postings of the Mumbai terror incident, (2) expose the vulnerabilities of Twitter as a participatory emergency reporting system in the terrorism context, and (3), based on the content analysis of Twitter postings, we suggest a conceptual framework for analyzing information control in the context of terrorism.

Market reactions to E-business outsourcing announcements: an event study

Stock markets have reacted favorably to firms who announced their implementation of E-business projects for commercial exploitation. Those that outsourced E-business projects in order to achieve swift execution also achieved abnormal positive returns. Contrary to expectations, outsourcing E-business projects with high task complexity also led to positive results. We analyzed the process and found that these three factors explained more than 20% of the variance in abnormal returns. The results were obtained from an event study of 96 E-business-related announcements, including those made by firms in the S&P500 index during 1999-2002. This paper contains information that should therefore help firms identify E-business projects for outsourcing.

Determinants of Sourcing During Technology Growth and Maturity: An Empirical Study of e-Commerce Sourcing

This paper conducts a two-period dynamic analysis of sourcing mode choices for e-commerce projects implemented by large firms during 1999-2002. We differentiate e-commerce assets that are the focus of a sourcing decision in terms of whether they are in the growth or maturity stages. We also consider hybrid governance mechanisms, such as minority equity arrangements, as a potential sourcing mode in addition to the conventional distinction between insourcing (i.e., hierarchical governance) and outsourcing (i.e., market governance). The rapid evolution in e-commerce technologies and their markets during this period allows us to test whether asset maturity plays any role in sourcing decisions. Results indicate that when the strategic intent of an e-commerce project is more business focused during the growth phase, hybrid governance is preferred over hierarchical governance for sourcing of e-commerce assets. Strategic intent is found not to influence sourcing mode choices during the technology/market maturity phase. Hierarchical governance is the preferred sourcing mode during the growth phase, when task complexity is high. For managing task complexity, as technologies and their markets mature, both hierarchical and hybrid governance modes become preferable to the market governance mode.

A comparison of B2B e-service solutions

The Internet is evolving not only to provide information and e-commerce transactions, but also to act as the platform through which services are delivered to businesses and customers. These electronic services or e-services could become a key part of the value provided by many businesses [2, 5, 10]. At the core of this evolution is Extensible Markup Language (XML), which has emerged as the foundation of all architectures suggested for such services. XML simplifies the exchange of information by letting users define their own syntax and use underlying technologies of the Internet. However, while organizations can define XML syntax to solve their specific problems, the multitude of syntax (schemas) creates incompatibility problems with schemas developed by others. This is one of the reasons why major organizations are creating business-to-business (B2B) XML framework standards to enable interoperability. To overcome these problems, efforts are underway to develop standards for e-services including eCo by a consortium led by CommerceNet; RosettaNet by a consortium that includes IBM, Microsoft, EDS, SAP, Cisco systems, Compaq and Intel; BizTalk by Microsoft; e-speak by Hewlett Packard (HP), and several others. Since these B2B interoperability standards are likely to be very important in the way businesses interact with each other in the future, an overview of these standardization efforts is certain to be of considerable importance to the IS community. This article describes the components (core modules of platforms for linking Internet-based service providers) of e-services and compares popular B-to-B e-commerce frameworks based on their support for e-service components.

Information Market-Based Decision Fusion

Improved classification performance has practical real-world benefits ranging from improved effectiveness in detecting diseases to increased efficiency in identifying firms that are committing financial fraud. Multiclassifier combination (MCC) aims to improve classification performance by combining the decisions of multiple individual classifiers. In this paper, we present information market-based fusion (IMF), a novel multiclassifier combiner method for decision fusion that is based on information markets. In IMF, the individual classifiers are implemented as participants in an information market where they place bets on different object classes. The reciprocals of the market odds that minimize the difference between the total betting amount and the potential payouts for different classes represent the MCC probability estimates of each class being the true object class. By using a market-based approach, IMF can adjust to changes in base-classifier performance without requiring offline training data or a static ensemble composition. Experimental results show that when the true classes of objects are only revealed for objects classified as positive, for low positive ratios, IMF outperforms three benchmarks combiner methods, majority, average, and weighted average; for high positive ratios, IMF outperforms majority and performs on par with average and weighted average. When the true classes of all objects are revealed, IMF outperforms weighted average and majority and marginally outperforms average.

Security analysis of Internet technology components enabling globally distributed workplaces—a framework

As organizations increasingly operate, compete, and cooperate in a global context, business processes are also becoming global to propagate the benefits from coordination and standardization across geographical boundaries. In this context, security has gained significance due to increased threats, as well as legislation and compliance issues. This article presents a framework for assessing the security of Internet technology components that support a globally distributed workplace. Four distinct information flow and design architectures are identified based on location sensitivities and placements of the infrastructure components. Using a combination of scenarios, architectures, and technologies, the article presents the framework of a development tool for information security officers to evaluate the security posture of an information system. To aid managers in better understanding their options to improve security of the system, we also propose a three-dimensional representation, based on the framework, for embedding solution alternatives. To demonstrate its use in a real-world context, the article also applies the framework to assess a globally distributed workforce application at a northeast financial institution.

Negotiation Behaviors in Agent-Based Negotiation Support Systems

Prior research on negotiation support systems (NSS) has paid limited attention to the information content in the observed bid sequences of negotiators as well as on the cognitive limitations of individual negotiators and their impacts on negotiation performance. In this paper, we assess the performance of human subjects in the context of agent-based NSS, and the accuracy of an exponential functional form in representing observed human bid sequences. We then predict the reservation values of negotiators based on their observed bids. Finally, we study the impact of negotiation support systems in helping users realize superior negotiation outcomes. Results indicate that an exponential function is a good model for observed bids.