Information Systems Research

Liu, Yahui; Wang, Lei; Yang, Shuai; Wang, Yanwen

doi: 10.1287/isre.2023.0024pmid: N/A

As artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital streamers gain popularity in live commerce, online retailers face critical questions about the actual business value of their operations. This study offers timely, evidence-based insights into the economic impact and optimal design of digital streamers. Although current designs do not significantly improve sales over no live streaming, incorporating behavioral realism—especially enhanced real-time question and answer (Q&A)—can boost sales by 25%, making digital streamers as effective as human hosts. Visual upgrades and human-like voices also help but to a lesser degree. Importantly, not all AI-driven enhancements deliver immediate returns, and imitating human scripts does not guarantee success. Retailers should focus on dynamic human-AI interaction features that drive engagement and trust, such as real-time Q&A and interactive giveaways. Designers are encouraged to integrate multiple realism features to maximize effectiveness while managing cost and scalability. These findings offer actionable guidance for retailers and platform designers seeking to leverage AI effectively and cost efficiently in live streaming commerce.

Xia, Yu; Chen, Hailiang; Fang, Yulin

doi: 10.1287/isre.2023.0504pmid: N/A

In the highly competitive mobile market, third-party vendors located outside the purview of hosting mobile platforms are becoming major suppliers of functional tool kits for mobile app development and innovation. However, app developers face challenges in navigating the use of third-party software development kits (SDKs) to enhance app performance. Drawing on the platform ecosystem literature, this study examines the roles of third-party SDKs, platform owners, and mobile app developers from a boundary-spanning perspective, emphasizing their respective contributions to shaping the functional value of third-party SDKs as boundary objects. By analyzing a longitudinal data set of 335,958 apps from the Apple App Store and Google Play, we find that integrating more third-party SDKs can significantly boost daily active users, especially when tool-type SDKs are utilized. However, this positive effect diminishes following platform updates that redefine platform boundaries and as developers gain more platform-specific experience. This study highlights the importance of balanced governance in platform ecosystems to sustain market growth, offering actionable insights for developers, policymakers, and industry leaders in shaping the future of mobile app markets.

Sun, Tianshu; Wei, Yanhao “Max”; Golden, Joseph

doi: 10.1287/isre.2019.9532pmid: N/A

A key feature of e-commerce is the access to a wide range of geographical areas; e-commerce platforms spend much effort customizing their strategies across geographical areas. Meanwhile, online word of mouth (WOM) is becoming an increasingly important driver for product sales on e-commerce platforms. This study investigates the geographical pattern of online WOM. Specifically, we examine whether and how customers’ local environment influences the generation and direction of online WOM. Leveraging a unique research design, we measure the online WOM at a U.S. national e-commerce platform by tracking the WOM referral decisions of customers. Whereas digital technologies have enabled customers to share without physical boundaries, we find that location still plays significant roles in the generation and direction of online WOM. First, a customer’s offline social environment (e.g., friend visiting frequency, neighbor interactions) significantly explains the generation of online referrals. Second, online referrals are largely bounded locally, and referrals in areas with more local social interactions are more likely to stay local. Third, even when referrals travel far, they are more likely to point to destinations socially similar to the origins. We derive important implications for firms in allocating resources across geographical areas and in using referrals to identify high-potential geographical markets.

Zhang, Xiaohui; He, Qinglai; Zhang, Zhongju

doi: 10.1287/isre.2024.0871pmid: N/A

Nowadays, online platforms constantly adjust their newsfeeds to boost engagement, often emphasizing nonsocial channels such as algorithmic recommendations over social ones such as user networks. However, ignoring the interactions between these channels can have unintended consequences. This study delves into this by assessing the impacts of a policy change that reduced the visibility of friends’ liked content on a major discussion platform. We found this led to an overall decrease in users’ content engagement. Although users engaged more with their friends’ original posts and trending topics, their interaction with nonsocial content such as algorithmic recommendations decreased. This reveals a key insight: social channels act as substitutes for one another but are complementary to nonsocial, algorithmic channels. Vibrant social activity is crucial for driving traffic to other parts of a platform. Crucially, the change also made users’ content engagement less diverse. Friends’ liked content is a key source of exposure to niche topics. For platform operators, this means that sidelining social features in favor of algorithmic feeds can backfire, reducing overall engagement and diversity. For policymakers concerned about online echo chambers, our findings suggest that content shared through extended social networks is vital for promoting a wider range of content.

Wei, Shaobo; Zhang, Yuanyuan; Dong, John Qi

doi: 10.1287/isre.2023.0580pmid: N/A

As organizations increasingly adopt artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance performance, ensuring that employees use AI in compliance with organizational policies becomes crucial for realizing its full value. However, employees’ AI compliance is not guaranteed and can vary based on how their AI use is managed. This study offers timely and actionable insights into how performance feedback—both positive and negative—influences employees’ AI compliance, and how these effects vary with AI identity. Drawing on feedback intervention theory, we conduct a longitudinal field study and a randomized experiment and find that positive performance feedback promotes AI compliance, whereas negative performance feedback reduces it. Importantly, employees with high AI identity respond more strongly to both types of performance feedback. Our findings further uncover distinct underlying mechanisms—task-motivation, task-learning, and meta-cognitive processes—that channel the effects of positive and negative performance feedback on AI compliance. Taken together, organizations should tailor performance feedback as part of AI governance by considering employees’ AI identity. Positive reinforcement of AI compliance is especially effective for employees with high AI identity, whereas cautions are needed when delivering negative performance feedback to avoid undermining AI compliance. Policy guidelines should support identity-sensitive performance feedback in practice.

Mo, Jiahui; Sarkar, Sumit; Chen, Jianqing

doi: 10.1287/isre.2021.0246pmid: N/A

Crowdsourcing platforms provide venues for firms looking for solutions (seekers) to interact with individuals who can provide solutions (solvers). As crowdsourcing contest platforms have grown in popularity, with numerous tasks being posted on a daily basis, a concern that has emerged is that many similar tasks compete for solver attention, with some tasks failing to attract sufficient solver participation. To alleviate this concern, in addition to regular task listings, many crowdsourcing platforms offer sponsorship programs under which seekers pay an extra fee for highlighting their tasks to draw solvers’ attention. We examine the effect of sponsorship on solver participation using a unique data set collected from a leading crowdsourcing platform. In contrast to platforms’ claims about the effect of sponsorship on participation, we find that sponsorship does not always boost participation in crowdsourcing contests; sponsorship increases the number of participants only when the task’s prize amount is already high. Furthermore, even when the number of participants increases, the increase comes primarily from low-ability solvers. We also find that when sponsorship increases the total number of submissions, it does so only by increasing the number of participants; sponsorship does not increase the number of submissions that individual solvers submit after joining a task. More granular analyses reveal an effect of anticipated increased competition caused by sponsorship on high-ability solvers that is not observed on those of low ability, explaining the difference in their participation decisions when facing sponsored tasks. We also find that the effect of sponsorship weakens over the duration of a task for high-ability solvers and is also weaker for solvers with more experience on the platform.History: Yong Tan, Senior Editor.Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2021.0246.

Gao, Yiwen; Wattal, Sunil; Thatcher, Jason

doi: 10.1287/isre.2023.0197pmid: N/A

The growing frequency of information security breaches and the rising importance of cybersecurity have prompted many firms to include chief information security officers (CISOs) in their top management teams (TMTs). Although CISOs are often viewed narrowly through a security-focused lens, our research shows that their inclusion in TMTs can offer a strategic advantage by significantly enhancing firm innovation. We identify three mechanisms that explain this effect: (1) reducing preventable security risks that might otherwise hinder innovation efforts; (2) enabling the adoption of innovation technologies (e.g., cloud computing, big data) that carry strategic security risks; and (3) strengthening security controls that protect intellectual property and mitigate innovation-related threats. Importantly, the CISO’s background matters. Those with specialized experience—either in the same industry or with prior executive roles—have a stronger impact on driving innovation. This research illuminates how CISOs’ presence on TMTs affects firms’ value creation from a security risk management perspective, and provides guidance for firms seeking to hire CISOs for innovation.