Winston T. Lin

The relationship between user participation and system success: a simultaneous contingency approach

Abstract The relationship between user participation and information system (IS) success has drawn attention from researchers for some time. It is assumed that strong participation of future users in the design of IS would lead to successful outcomes in terms of more IS usage, greater user acceptance, and increased user satisfaction. However, in spite of this, much of the empirical research so far has been unable to demonstrate its benefits. This paper examines the participation–success relationship in a broader context, where the effects of user participation and two other factors, user attitudes and user involvement, on system success occur simultaneously. Other contingency variables considered here are: system impact, system complexity, and development methodology. The theoretical framework and the associated hypotheses are empirically tested by a survey of 32 organizations. Empirical results corroborate the positive link between user participation and user satisfaction and provide evidence on the interplay between user attitudes and user involvement.

Technical efficiency analysis of information technology investments: a two-stage empirical investigation

Abstract One of the difficult challenges facing management and researchers today is how to justify costly investments in information technology (IT). This paper presents an approach to investigating the effects of IT on technical efficiency in a firm’s production process through a two-stage analytical study with a firm-level data set. In the first stage, a nonparametric frontier method of data envelopment analysis (DEA) is employed to measure technical efficiency scores for the firms. The second stage then utilizes the Tobit model to regress the efficiency scores upon the corresponding IT investments of the firms. Strong statistical evidence is presented to confirm that IT exerts a significant favorable impact on technical efficiency and in turn, gives rise to the productivity growth that was claimed by recent studies of IT economic value. Practical implications are then drawn from the empirical evidence.

Measuring the value of information technology in technical efficiency with stochastic production frontiers

Abstract With the vast amounts of resources being invested in information technology (IT), the issue of how to measure and manage the impact of IT on organizational performance has received increased attention. Based on the production theory in microeconomics, this paper investigates the relationship between IT investments and technical efficiency in the firms production process. The application of stochastic production frontiers to a comprehensive firm-level panel data set provides us with empirical evidence that IT has a significantly positive effect on technical efficiency and, hence, contributes to the productivity growth in organizations, claimed by some earlier studies with the same data set. The stochastic production frontiers considered include the popular Cobb–Douglas function and the more flexible translog function. Both specifications of production technology lead to the same conclusion. Managerial implications derived from the empirical results are also presented.

The business value of information technology and inputs substitution: the productivity paradox revisited

The business value of information technology (IT) is an extremely important but highly controversial issue that has sparked a great deal of research during the past two decades. Closely related to the issue are the productivity paradox of information systems and the substitutability of IT stock for both traditional capital and labor. Numerous studies have been undertaken to either explain or dispel the paradox. This paper represents one significant extension to previous work and is a further effort to jointly investigate the business value issue, the paradox, and the potential of the substitution between IT capital and ordinary capital and labor, by estimating the IT business value in terms of the impact of IT on technical efficiency, based on the constant elasticity of substitution (known as CES) stochastic production frontier model, at three levels: firm, industry, and sector. The major findings include: the relationship between technical efficiency and IT investment is not robust with respect to the specifications of production frontiers; the productivity paradox is still existent, inconsistent with conventional wisdom, IT has substantial impacts on the five parameters associated with the CES production process; IT stock, traditional capital, and traditional labor are not pairwise substitutable; IT stock appears to be as important as capital, but it is not possible to use IT stock to replace the role of labor entirely; decreasing returns to scale are found irrespective of the levels of IT investments, and technical efficiency tends to decrease as IT investments increase; the industry-level analysis suggests that IT capital is more important for the services industries than for the manufacturing industries; and the sector analysis seems to indicate that the services sector is just slightly less technically efficient than the manufacturing sector.

The demand for natural gas, electricity and heating oil in the United States

Abstract In this paper the residential, commercial, and industrial consumption of natural gas, electricity, and heating oil in the Bureau of the Census regions and subregions is studied with an errorcomponents model consisting of nine equations. The nine equations are estimated simultaneously by the Averys error components and seemingly unrelated regressions (EC-SUR) procedure as well as individually by the ordinary least-squares and error components methods. The EC-SUR estimates of short-run and long-run price and income elasticities and adjustment speeds are analyzed. The main results include: (i) the residential, commercial, or industrial consumption of a fuel good is price- and income-inelastic in the short run and is elastic or becomes more elastic in the long run; (ii) the speed of adjustment differs from a fuel good to another for different uses in different (sub)regions; (iii) the patterns of the demand for a fuel good are not uniform within or across (sub)regions; (iv) there are differences in the behavior of energy consumption because of geographical locations as well as similarities because of geographical conditions; (v) the cross-price elasticities imply the existence of substitutability and complementarity among the three types of fuel goods; (vi) in the long run, the demand for a fuel commodity in different consuming sectors exhibits a relatively large degree of volatility in response to changes in its own price, the prices of other fuel goods, and income; and (vii) considering the nation as a whole, it is found that residential consumption of natural gas, electricity and heating oil is more elastic with respect to price than to income in the short and long run; that residential, commercial and industrial demand for electricity are income-inelastic in the short and long run, but commercial and industrial use of natural gas and electricity are more sensitive to both price and income than residential demand in the short and long run, and that the speed of adjustment for heating oil is relatively slower than for natural gas and electricity. These findings bear important implications for national energy policies.

Assessing the input effect on productive efficiency in production systems: the value of information technology capital

It is an imperative task for management to measure an organizations performance against its peers, competitors or itself. Among the performance measures frequently used, productive efficiency concerns the effective usage of input resources in producing output. Moreover, we are still unclear about how to identify the sources of such efficiencies so as to explain their causes. The issue becomes even more relevant and important but uncertain if the intended factor can also be treated as a non-traditional input in the production process. Treating information technology as a non-ordinary capital, this paper explores its effect on productive efficiency in a two-stage procedure. The first stage uses productive efficiency derived from parametric stochastic production frontiers models to measure the firms performance, comparing the models with and without information technology investment as an independent input factor. The second stage then applies the non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-ranks method to test whether the information technology input has a positive impact on productive efficiency. The procedure is applied to a firm-level data set to corroborate the positive input effect of information technology on productive efficiency in the production system.

Modeling and forecasting hospital patient movements: Univariate and multiple time series approaches

Abstract The purpose of this paper is two-fold: it recognizes the importance of modeling and forecasting as a future-oriented decision-making process in the field of health care by proposing to model and forecast monthly patient movements in individual hospitals by means of the Box-Jenkins univariate and Tiao-Box multiple time series approaches; and it attempts to determine the choice between the univariate method and the multivariate approach in the case of hospital patient data. The forecasting performance of the resulting models is evaluated against the Holt-Winters exponential smoothing model using the mean squared error, mean absolute deviation, and mean absolute percentage error, for five non-overlapping time periods. The test results suggest that the proper choice of time series techniques to be applied to hospital admissions and discharges has an important and direct bearing on the reliability of forecasting results. Therefore, the practical implications and usefulness of time series techniques and models are discussed.

Performance evaluation of production of IT capital goods across OECD countries: A stochastic frontier approach to Malmquist index

As integrated supply chains, ubiquitous computing, and mobile applications have become the backbone for conducting business nowadays, the economic significance of information technology (IT) is self-evident. In this paper, we study IT value from an unconventional perspective: the production of IT capital goods. Using the true fixed-effects model of translog stochastic production frontier, we evaluate the performance of IT industries for 19 Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries over the period of 2000 to 2009. We examine the productivity growth of these IT industries based on the Malmquist index and further analyze these productivity patterns through technological change and efficiency change. Overall, these IT industries are found to enjoy greater productivity growth than other industries when compared with previous findings. Our results show that technological progress is the main driver of productivity growth for the IT industry, efficiency change has a negligible effect, and each countrys IT industry exhibits a distinctive performance profile. Policy implications are drawn from our results and related issues are identified for future research. We also highlight the advance of research methodology used in the study that can account for measurement errors, random fluctuations, and unobserved heterogeneity commonly encountered in empirical information systems research.

Forecasting foreign exchange rates with an intrinsically nonlinear dynamic speed of adjustment model

Forecasting foreign exchange rates is an important but difficult process; therefore, it is important to use a superior forecasting model. The paper takes up this criterion and proposes to describe and forecast foreign exchange rates by developing an intrinsically nonlinear model with variable and dynamic speeds of adjustment. It is found that the speed of adjusting the random (or expected) to the equilibrium rate is very slow, implying that fiscal policy (statistically insignificat) and monetary policy (statistically significant) may be ineffective to induce changes in the adjustment speed. We also find that the nonlinear dynamic model improves forecasting performance, implying that nonlinearities in the sense of functional forms are exploitable for improved point forecasting of foreign exchange rates.

Analysis of Lumber and Pulpwood Production in a Partial Adjustment Model With Dynamic and Variable Speeds of Adjustment

This article proposes a partial adjustment model in which the speed of adjustment is a linear function of policy and economic variables rather than fixed. The model is applied to analyze the behavior of lumber and pulpwood production. Since the model is overparameterized and intrinsically nonlinear, the task of estimation is done by the nonlinear least squares method, using quarterly data covering the period from 1961 through 1983. Both the adjustment speeds of lumber and pulpwood production are found to vary inversely with the discrepancy between the actual and the expected interest rate. The adjustment speed of lumber production is also found to shift positively with the difference between the actual and the expected government expenditure. In addition, the results show that the adjustment speed of lumber production suffers from a longterm declining trend, whereas the adjustment speed of pulpwood production exhibits a long-term upward sweep, and that desired outputs of lumber and pulpwood respond negati...