The 10 most-cited articles in MIS Quarterly, 2022

Understanding information technology (IT) use is vital for the information systems (IS) discipline due to its substantial positive and negative consequences. In recent years, IT use for personal purposes has grown rapidly. Although personal use is voluntary and can often reflect fun, technostress is a common negative consequence of such use. When left unaddressed, technostress can cause serious harm to IT users. However, prior research has not explained how technostress forms over time or how its mitigation takes place in a personal—rather than organizational—environment. To address these research gaps, we conducted a qualitative study with narrative interviews of IT users who had experienced technostress. This study contributes to (1) the technostress literature by unpacking states in which technostress forms and can be mitigated and (2) the IT affordance literature by explaining the role of affordances and their actualizations in technostress as well as introducing the new concept of actualization cost. In terms of practice, our findings help individuals and societies identify the…

With today’s technological advancements, mobile phones and wearable devices have become extensions of an increasingly diffused and smart digital infrastructure. In this paper, we examine mobile health (mHealth) platforms and their health and economic impacts on the outcomes of chronic disease patients. To do so, we partnered with a major mHealth firm that provides one of the largest mobile health app platforms in Asia specializing in diabetes care. We designed and implemented a randomized field experiment based on detailed patient health activities (e.g., steps, exercises, sleep, food intake) and blood glucose values from 1,070 diabetes patients over several months. Our main findings show that the adoption of the mHealth app leads to an improvement in health behavior, which in turn leads to both short term metrics (such as reduction in patients’ blood glucose and glycated hemoglobin levels) and longer-term metrics (such as hospital visits and medical expenses). Patients who adopted the mHealth app undertook higher levels of exercise, consumed healthier food with lower calories,…

This paper explores the structure and design of digital strategic initiatives (DSI): identifiable competitive moves that depend on digital resources to create and appropriate economic value. We use the term digital deliberately, in line with the recent push for discerning the so-called IT “x” and Digital “x” phenomena. The paper contributes to basic science by precisely defining the digital strategic initiative concept and its essential elements: digital resources. It clarifies the difference between digital resources and established constructs such as IT resources and IT-enabled resources. We posit that the defining characteristics of digital resources are their modular design, encapsulation of value, and programmatic interface. This work also shows how the design and development of digital strategic initiatives thrive in an infrastructural, combinatorial, and servitized environment. Using illustrative cases, we demonstrate applications of the concepts by introducing two value creation pathways for DSI: (1) orchestration of digital resources and (2) creation of novel digital…

Black hat hackers use malicious exploits to circumvent security controls and take advantage of system vulnerabilities worldwide, costing the global economy over $450 billion annually. While many organizations are increasingly turning to cyber threat intelligence (CTI) to help prioritize their vulnerabilities, extant CTI processes are often criticized as being reactive to known exploits. One promising data source that can help develop proactive CTI is the vast and ever-evolving Dark Web. In this study, we adopted the computational design science paradigm to design a novel deep learning (DL)-based exploit-vulnerability attention deep structured semantic model (EVA-DSSM) that includes bidirectional processing and attention mechanisms to automatically link exploits from the Dark Web to vulnerabilities. We also devised a novel device vulnerability severity metric (DVSM) that incorporates the exploit post date and vulnerability severity to help cybersecurity professionals with their device prioritization and risk management efforts. We rigorously evaluated the EVA-DSSM against…

We have recently witnessed two important trends in online retailing: The advent of new media (e.g., social media and search engines) has made advertising affordable for small sellers, and large online retailers (e.g., Amazon and JD.com) have opened their platforms to allow even direct competitors to sell on their platforms. We examine how new-media advertising affects retail platform openness. We develop a game-theoretic model in which a leading retailer, who has both valuation and awareness advantages, and a third-party seller, who sells an identical product, engage in price competition. We find that the availability of relatively low-cost advertising through new media plays a critical role in influencing the leading retailer to open its platform and to form a partnership with the third-party seller, which is impossible when the cost of advertising is relatively high. Low-cost advertising can increase consumer surplus either directly via the third-party seller’s advertising or indirectly via the partnership on the leading retailer’s platform. We also find that the leading retailer…

By empowering customers to make fitting purchases, user reviews play an important role in reducing inefficiencies in the provisioning of product information. Because of the abundance of reviews and the signals they provide, this information may become confusing and risks overloading customers. Consequently, review hosting platforms have adjusted their designs to feature a signal “distilled” from a selective set of “top reviews” and their valences. The expected ease with which customers process this signal is intended to increase their satisfaction, thus reducing dispersion in their subsequent review ratings. In this study, we analyze the influential role that top reviews and their valence play under various scenarios: when customers are overloaded by a large number of reviews, when top reviews themselves are not parsimonious in number, and when the signals from top reviews are not in concordance with that from all the other reviews. We find that the valence of top reviews plays a central role in mitigating information overload. However, the influence of those top reviews diminishes…

The benefits that organizations accrue from information systems depend on how effectively the systems are used. Yet despite the importance of knowing what it takes to use information systems effectively, little theory on the topic exists. One recent and largely untested exception is the theory of effective use (TEU). We report on a contextualization, extension, and test of TEU in the business intelligence (BI) context, a context of considerable importance in which researchers have called for such studies. We used a mixed methods, three-phase approach involving instrument development (n = 218), a two-wave cross-sectional survey (n = 437), and three sets of follow-up interviews (n = 33). The paper contributes by (1) showing how TEU can be contextualized, operationalized, and extended, (2) demonstrating that many of TEU’s predictions hold in the BI context while also revealing ways to improve the theory, and (3) offering practical insights that executives can draw on to improve the use of BI in their organizations.

Privacy needs on today’s internet differ from the information privacy needs in traditional e-commerce settings due to their focus on interactions among online peers rather than merely transactions with an online vendor. Peer-oriented online interactions have critical implications for an individual’s virtual presence and self-cognition. Yet existing conceptualizations of internet privacy concerns have solely focused on the control of personal information release and on online interactions with online vendors. Drawing on the theory of personal boundaries, this study revisits the theoretical foundation of online privacy and proposes a multidimensional peer-related privacy concern construct, that focuses on privacy violations from online peers. We term this new construct “Peer Privacy Concern” (PrPC) and define it as the general feeling of being unable to maintain functional personal boundaries in online activities as a result of the behavior of online peers. This construct consists of four dimensions comprised of a reconceptualization of information privacy concerns to also reflect…

This research highlights the circulative nature of digital platform ecosystem dynamics. Investigating these dynamics, we examine the mutual influence between participants’ product scope and product innovation over time and probe the moderating role of co-created collaborative networks. We distinguish between two types of product innovation: new product development and existing product updates. Our longitudinal analysis of the Hadoop software ecosystem indicates that participants covering a broader scope of the platform’s technological layers are less likely to develop new products but more likely to update existing products. In turn, participants with more frequent new product development are more likely to expand their product scope, whereas those with more frequent existing product updates are less likely to pursue scope expansion. Participants’ centrality in the ecosystem’s collaborative network amplifies the bidirectional link between product scope and existing product updates but weakens the link between product scope and new product development. Our findings offer a…

Several online review platforms offer monetary incentives to motivate individuals to write reviews and keep them engaged with the platforms. While existing studies have examined the effects of completion-contingent monetary incentives (which uniformly reward users as long as they write reviews on the platform), we know little about the effectiveness of performance-contingent monetary incentives (which reward platform users based on the quality of their reviews). In this paper, we examine the effects of receiving performance-contingent rewards on users’ continued contribution in terms of the quantity, quality, and valence of the reviews they generate. We leverage a quasi-experiment research design to analyze a large dataset that we obtain through a collaboration with a large restaurant review platform in Asia. Our evidence shows that after receiving performance-contingent rewards, individuals write more reviews and write reviews that are of better quality. Interestingly, receiving rewards does not significantly affect the valence of subsequent reviews. Our study extends past research…