Decision Support Systems最新文献

We study how organizational knowledge sharing behavior is affected by avatar use during computer-mediated communication (CMC) with an unknown co-worker. Experimental results from two ethnically different samples provide theory-consistent evidence that outgroup discrimination—manifested as refusal to share knowledge—can get magnified in the ‘virtual world’ when avatars are used for self-representation. In supplemental analysis, we use eye-tracking data to provide preliminary evidence for behavioral differences—in terms of gaze fixation—when knowledge sharing requests accompanied by avatar profiles as opposed to photo profiles are processed and further explore how individuals' choice of using avatars vs. photographs for their online profile affects their co-workers' perception. Our study contributes to understanding cooperative organizational behavior in the virtual space. Managing cooperative organizational behavior in the virtual space is becoming increasingly important as digital work further penetrates contemporary work arrangements.

Research transparency promotes openness and trust in the process, evidence, contributions, and implications of scientific inquiry. Information Systems (IS), as a pluralistic research community, must address transparency in relation to its use of multiple research methods appropriate to complex socio-technical contexts and challenging research questions. This commentary presents a set of important transparency challenges and actionable guidance for the Design Science Research (DSR) community. We propose a DSR Transparency Framework containing six forms of transparency: process, problem space, solution space, build, evaluation, and contribution. For each, we discuss challenges with guidance to achieve effective DSR transparency throughout the publication process.

An increasing number of merchants are using online platforms to promote their products; however, much is still unknown about how consumers behave in response to online promotions. This study investigates factors affecting consumers' purchase intentions and purchase behaviors during online promotions. We classify consumers into two categories, one mainly affected by the time pressure of promotion and the other primarily subject to the effect of memory decay. We then propose an analytical model to capture the market demand during an online promotion. Our analytical result indicates that there exist four types of demand patterns during online promotions, i.e., U-shape, inverted U-shape, monotonically increasing, and monotonically decreasing. We subsequently explore factors that can affect the type of demand patterns, such as the product type (nondurable and durable goods), duration of the promotion, discount level, and product category. Our empirical analyses of real-world promotion and sales data from a B2C e-commerce platform validate the analytical results. The type of demand curves depends on the characteristics of the goods and promotions. For instance, the inverted U-shape demand curve appears only for nondurable consumer goods, whereas the U-shape curve exists only for durable consumer goods. Finally, in a series of counterfactual analyses based on the proposed model, we show how revenues change during an online promotion in response to varying parameters of promotions and derive some interesting observations. These findings provide important insights to online retailers and can help them better understand their consumers and optimize their product promotion strategies.

Shapley values have become one of the go-to methods to explain complex models to end-users. They provide a model agnostic post-hoc explanation with foundations in game theory: what is the worth of a player (in machine learning, a feature value) in the objective function (the output of the complex machine learning model). One downside is that they always require outputs of the model when some features are missing. These are usually computed by taking the expectation over the missing features. This however introduces a non-trivial choice: do we condition on the unknown features or not? In this paper we examine this question and claim that they represent two different explanations which are valid for different end-users: one that explains the model and one that explains the model combined with the feature dependencies in the data. We propose a new algorithmic approach to combine both explanations, removing the burden of choice and enhancing the explanatory power of Shapley values, and show that it achieves intuitive results on simple problems. We apply our method to two real-world datasets and discuss the explanations. Finally, we demonstrate how our method is either equivalent or superior to state-to-of-art Shapley value implementations while simultaneously allowing for increased insight into the model-data structure.

This study aims to assess the financial statement fraud risk ex ante and empirically explore its information content to help improve decision-making and daily operations. We propose an ex-ante fraud risk index by adopting an ensemble learning approach and a theoretically grounded framework. Our ensemble learning model systematically examines the fraud process and deals effectively with the unique challenges in the financial fraud setting, which yields superior prediction performance. More importantly, we empirically examine the information content of our estimated ex-ante fraud risk from the perspective of operational efficiency. Our empirical results find that the estimated ex-ante fraud risk is negatively correlated with sustaining operational efficiency. This study redefines fraud detection as an ongoing endeavor rather than a retrospective event, thus enabling managers and stakeholders to reconsider their operation decisions and reshape their entire operation processes accordingly.

Malicious content threatens the integrity and quality of content in social networks. Research and practice have experimented with network intervention strategies to curb malicious content propagation. These strategies lack efficiency, target malicious content propagators, and abridge freedom of speech. We draw upon the preferential attachment literature and cognitive load theory to employ the mechanisms of network formation, information sharing, and limited human cognitive capacities to propose an alternative feed management strategy—Preferentiality Dampened Feed Management. We compare and contrast this strategy against other established strategies using an agent-based model that utilizes empirical data from Twitter and findings from the prior literature. The results from our two experiments suggest that our proposed strategy is more effective in curbing malicious content propagation than other established strategies. Our work has important implications for the network interventions literature and practical implications for platform providers, social media users, and society.

Beyond managing student dropout, higher education stakeholders need decision support to consistently influence the student learning process to keep students motivated, engaged, and successful. At the course level, the combination of predictive analytics and self-regulation theory can help instructors determine the best study advice and allow learners to better self-regulate and determine how they want to learn. The best performing techniques are often black-box models that favor performance over interpretability and are heavily influenced by course contexts. In this study, we argue that explainable AI has the potential not only to uncover the reasons behind model decisions, but also to reveal their stability across contexts, effectively bridging the gap between predictive and explanatory learning analytics (LA). In contributing to decision support systems research, this study (1) leverages traditional techniques, such as concept drift and performance drift, to investigate the stability of student success prediction models over time; (2) uses Shapley Additive explanations in a novel way to explore the stability of extracted feature importance rankings generated for these models; (3) generates new insights that emerge from stable features across cohorts, enabling teachers to determine study advice. We believe this study makes a strong contribution to education research at large and expands the field of LA by augmenting the interpretability and explainability of prediction algorithms and ensuring their applicability in changing contexts.

With the development of e-commerce, collective overreactions such as buying frenzy have become prominent. However, studies have rarely investigated the mechanism of irrational consumer behavior at the group level. To investigate the evolution of collective overreaction in dynamic online product diffusion networks, we employed a sequential multiple-methods approach. A conceptual model is constructed to capture the influence of social network dynamic evolution on individual irrationality. An agent-based model (ABM) under different network dynamic growth mechanisms is implemented and verified. The findings revealed the following. In external dynamic growth mechanisms, key opinion consumer (KOC) connection can lead to positive collective overreaction (i.e., the adoption rate of consumer groups spikes). This effect fades as the probability of KOC connection increases and stabilizes as the node change rate decreases. Random connection is prone to negative collective overreaction (i.e., a sudden and sharp decline in the adoption rate of consumer groups), and key opinion leader (KOL) connection exhibits both positive and negative collective overreaction. Increasing the edge change rate increases the frequency of negative collective overreaction in KOL connections. In internal dynamic growth mechanisms, KOL and KOC connections are prone to negative collective overreaction; increasing the edge change rate can reduce the frequency of negative collective overreaction in KOL overreaction, and an appropriate edge change rate can inhibit the emergence of negative collective overreaction in KOC connection. This research contributes to the area of internet product marketing and provides a new basic framework through which to combine psychology and the ABM.

The field of decision sciences is undergoing significant disruption and reinvention because of rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the design of complex human-artificial intelligence systems (HAIS). The integration of human decision behaviors with cutting-edge AI capabilities is transforming business and society in irreversible ways. In this paper, we examine prior research published in Decision Support Systems that makes contributions to HAIS design science research (DSR). We define synergistic interactions among DSR, AI technology design, and human interaction design, which we use to specify the dimensions for an analysis of the DSS HAIS literature. We identify key challenges, leading to future research directions for the design of HAIS as solutions for complex decision science problems.

Teams are building blocks of organizations and essential inputs of organizational success. This article studies a data-driven analytical approach that exploits the rich data accumulated in organizations in the digital era to design teams, including prescribing team composition and formation decisions. We propose to evaluate a team regarding its performance and temporal stability, referred to as sustainable effectiveness (SE). Our approach estimates the team's performance and stability using machine learning models. It then optimizes an integrated objective of the team's performance and stability through mixed-integer programming models formulated according to predictive models. Consequently, this approach mines meaningful team compositions from historical data and guides strategic team formation accordingly. We conduct empirical studies using authentic data from our partner company in the real estate brokerage industry. The findings reveal that teams that adhere to our model's recommendations achieve an average percentage improvement of 153.1% to 156.5% higher than the benchmark teams, particularly when recruiting one or two members in their actual SE during the post-formation period. We further disclose the mechanism underlying this improvement from the perspective of changes in team compositions. Our study provides a decision support tool for team design and ensuing team dynamic management.