• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.35-55
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• 2013

Information technology is a critical resource necessary for any company hoping to support and realize its strategic goals, which contribute to growth promotion and sustainable development. The selection of information technology and its strategic use are imperative for the enhanced performance of every aspect of company management, leading a wide range of companies to have invested continuously in information technology. Despite researchers, managers, and policy makers' keen interest in how information technology contributes to organizational performance, there is uncertainty and debate about the result of information technology investment. In other words, researchers and managers cannot easily identify the independent factors that can impact the investment performance of information technology. This is mainly owing to the fact that many factors, ranging from the internal components of a company, strategies, and external customers, are interconnected with the investment performance of information technology. Using an agent-based simulation technique, this research extracts factors expected to affect investment performance on information technology, simplifies the analyses of their relationship with economic modeling, and examines the performance dependent on changes in the factors. In terms of economic modeling, I expand the model that highlights the way in which product quality moderates the relationship between information technology investments and economic performance (Thatcher and Pingry, 2004) by considering the cost of information technology investment and the demand creation resulting from product quality enhancement. For quality enhancement and its consequences for demand creation, I apply the concept of information quality and decision-maker quality (Raghunathan, 1999). This concept implies that the investment on information technology improves the quality of information, which, in turn, improves decision quality and performance, thus enhancing the level of product or service quality. Additionally, I consider the effect of word of mouth among consumers, which creates new demand for a product or service through the information diffusion effect. This demand creation is analyzed with an agent-based simulation model that is widely used for network analyses. Results show that the investment on information technology enhances the quality of a company's product or service, which indirectly affects the economic performance of that company, particularly with regard to factors such as consumer surplus, company profit, and company productivity. Specifically, when a company makes its initial investment in information technology, the resultant increase in the quality of a company's product or service immediately has a positive effect on consumer surplus, but the investment cost has a negative effect on company productivity and profit. As time goes by, the enhancement of the quality of that company's product or service creates new consumer demand through the information diffusion effect. Finally, the new demand positively affects the company's profit and productivity. In terms of the investment strategy for information technology, this study's results also reveal that the selection of information technology needs to be based on analysis of service and the network effect of customers, and demonstrate that information technology implementation should fit into the company's business strategy. Specifically, if a company seeks the short-term enhancement of company performance, it needs to have a one-shot strategy (making a large investment at one time). On the other hand, if a company seeks a long-term sustainable profit structure, it needs to have a split strategy (making several small investments at different times). The findings from this study make several contributions to the literature. In terms of methodology, the study integrates both economic modeling and simulation technique in order to overcome the limitations of each methodology. It also indicates the mediating effect of product quality on the relationship between information technology and the performance of a company. Finally, it analyzes the effect of information technology investment strategies and information diffusion among consumers on the investment performance of information technology.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.177-193
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• 2014

Over the past decade, there has been a rapid diffusion of electronic commerce and a rising number of interconnected networks, resulting in an escalation of security threats and privacy concerns. Electronic commerce has a built-in trade-off between the necessity of providing at least some personal information to consummate an online transaction, and the risk of negative consequences from providing such information. More recently, the frequent disclosure of private information has raised concerns about privacy and its impacts. This has motivated researchers in various fields to explore information privacy issues to address these concerns. Accordingly, the necessity for information privacy policies and technologies for collecting and storing data, and information privacy research in various fields such as medicine, computer science, business, and statistics has increased. The occurrence of various information security accidents have made finding experts in the information security field an important issue. Objective measures for finding such experts are required, as it is currently rather subjective. Based on social network analysis, this paper focused on a framework to evaluate the process of finding experts in the information security field. We collected data from the National Discovery for Science Leaders (NDSL) database, initially collecting about 2000 papers covering the period between 2005 and 2013. Outliers and the data of irrelevant papers were dropped, leaving 784 papers to test the suggested hypotheses. The co-authorship network data for co-author relationship, publisher, affiliation, and so on were analyzed using social network measures including centrality and structural hole. The results of our model estimation are as follows. With the exception of Hypothesis 3, which deals with the relationship between eigenvector centrality and performance, all of our hypotheses were supported. In line with our hypothesis, degree centrality (H1) was supported with its positive influence on the researchers' publishing performance (p<0.001). This finding indicates that as the degree of cooperation increased, the more the publishing performance of researchers increased. In addition, closeness centrality (H2) was also positively associated with researchers' publishing performance (p<0.001), suggesting that, as the efficiency of information acquisition increased, the more the researchers' publishing performance increased. This paper identified the difference in publishing performance among researchers. The analysis can be used to identify core experts and evaluate their performance in the information privacy research field. The co-authorship network for information privacy can aid in understanding the deep relationships among researchers. In addition, extracting characteristics of publishers and affiliations, this paper suggested an understanding of the social network measures and their potential for finding experts in the information privacy field. Social concerns about securing the objectivity of experts have increased, because experts in the information privacy field frequently participate in political consultation, and business education support and evaluation. In terms of practical implications, this research suggests an objective framework for experts in the information privacy field, and is useful for people who are in charge of managing research human resources. This study has some limitations, providing opportunities and suggestions for future research. Presenting the difference in information diffusion according to media and proximity presents difficulties for the generalization of the theory due to the small sample size. Therefore, further studies could consider an increased sample size and media diversity, the difference in information diffusion according to the media type, and information proximity could be explored in more detail. Moreover, previous network research has commonly observed a causal relationship between the independent and dependent variable (Kadushin, 2012). In this study, degree centrality as an independent variable might have causal relationship with performance as a dependent variable. However, in the case of network analysis research, network indices could be computed after the network relationship is created. An annual analysis could help mitigate this limitation.