Information Systems Frontiers

In October 2019, the information systems community was shocked and saddened to learn that H. Jeff Smith had passed away after battling lymphoma. While primarily known for his pioneering work on privacy, Jeff made a number of significant contributions to the field of information systems. In this invited editorial, we examine the impact of Jeff’s scholarship on the areas of data governance, consumer privacy, and project status reporting.

Observing how humans and robots interact is an integral part of understanding how they can effectively coexist. This ability to undertake these observations was taken for granted before the COVID-19 pandemic restricted the possibilities of performing HRI study-based interactions. We explore the problem of how HRI research can occur in a setting where physical separation is the most reliable way of preventing disease transmission. We present the results of an exploratory experiment that suggests Remote-HRI (R-HRI) studies may be a viable alternative to traditional face-to-face HRI studies. An R-HRI study minimizes or eliminates in-person interaction between the experimenter and the participant and implements a new protocol for interacting with the robot to minimize physical contact. Our results showed that participants interacting with the robot remotely experienced a higher cognitive workload, which may be due to minor cultural and technical factors. Importantly, however, we also found that whether participants interacted with the robot in-person (but socially distanced) or remotely over a network, their experience, perception of, and attitude towards the robot were unaffected.

This paper presents a MAS-based infrastructure for the specification of a negotiation framework that handles multiple negotiation protocols in a coherent and flexible way. Although it may be used to implement one single type of agreement mechanism, it has been designed in such a way that multiple mechanisms may be available at any given time, to be activated and tailored on demand (on-line) by participating agents. The framework is also generic enough so that new protocols may be easily added. This infrastructure has been successfully used in a case study to implement a simulation tool as a component of a larger framework based on an electronic market of water rights.

Firms are increasingly employing social media to manage relationships with partner organizations, yet the role of institutional pressures in social media assimilation has not been studied. We investigate social media assimilation in firms using a model that combines the two theoretical streams of IT adoption: organizational innovation and institutional theory. The study uses a composite view of absorptive capacity that includes both previous experience with similar technology and the general ability to learn and exploit new technologies. We find that institutional pressures are an important antecedent to absorptive capacity, an important measure of organizational learning capability. The paper augments theory in finding the role and limits of institutional pressures. Institutional pressures are found to have no direct effect on social media assimilation but to impact absorptive capacity, which mediates its influence on assimilation.

Traditional citation analysis methods have been criticized because their theoretical base of statistical counts does not reflect the motive or judgment of citing authors. In particular, self-citations may give undue credits to a cited article or mislead scientific development. This research aims to answer the question of whether self-citation is biased by probing into the motives and context of citations. It takes an integrated and fine-grained view of self-citations by examining them via multiple lenses — polarity, density, and location of citations. In addition, it explores potential moderating effects of citation level and associations among location contexts of citations to the same references for the first time. We analyzed academic publications across different topics and disciplines using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The results provide evidence that self-citations are free of bias in terms of citation density and polarity uncertainty, but they can be biased with respect to positivity and negativity of citations. Furthermore, this study reveals impacts of self-citing behavior on some citation patterns involving citation density, location concentration, and associations. The examination of self-citing behavior from those new perspectives shed new lights on the nature and function of self-citing behavior.