Information Technology and Management

In this paper, we present XRL/Woflan. XRL/Woflan is a software tool using state-of-the-art Petri-net analysis techniques for verifying XRL workflows. The workflow language XRL (eXchangeable Routing Language) supports cross-organizational processes. XRL uses XML for the representation of process definitions and Petri nets for its semantics. XRL is instance-based, therefore, workflow definitions can be changed on the fly and sent across organizational boundaries. These features are vital for today's dynamic and networked economy. However, the features also enable subtle, but highly disruptive, cross-organizational errors. On-the-fly changes and one-of-a-kind processes are destined to result in errors. Moreover, errors of a cross-organizational nature are difficult to repair. XRL/Woflan uses eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) to transform XRL specifications to a specific class of Petri nets, and to allow users to design new routing constructs, thus making XRL extensibe. The Petri-net representation is used to determine whether the workflow is correct. If the workflow is not correct, anomalies such as deadlocks and livelocks are reported.

The ciphertext policy is a promising cryptographic technique for smart home data security, and the secrecy of the encryption key purely depends on the security of the key derivation mechanism. In a smart home network, many devices have limited computational and communication resources, and any such mechanism to create a security key should consider these computational and communicational constraints. In this paper, we propose a collaborative and verifiable key derivation protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography for smart home security. Our construction realizes a distributed computation of the security key without adding any extra energy consumption. The proposed collaborative mechanism effectively solves not only the key derivation mechanism security issue, but also adds a verifiability function to avoid keys falsification. Meanwhile, it helps markedly reduce the key derivation overhead at the energy constrained device. A comparison with other collaborative and non collaborative key derivation schemes, demonstrates that our scheme has somewhat better performance in terms of energy overhead at the constrained device side. Also, we provide proof of security of the proposed protocol.

E-procurement systems are computer systems and communication networks through which firms buy and sell products. We identify two types of e-procurement systems: extranets and e-markets. Extranets connect the buyer and its suppliers with a closed network, while e-markets create open networks for buyer and supplier interactions. The differences between them lie in system implementation costs, marketplace benefits, and the extent of supplier competitive advantage that develops due to information sharing. In this article, we develop a new theoretical model to analyze the adoption of e-procurement systems from the buyer’s perspective, to explore the set of conditions under which the buyer will prefer to procure via an electronic market instead of using proprietary extranet connections. The primary finding is that a buyer will adopt an e-market approach when the supplier’s competitive advantage derived from access to strategic information is modest compared with the marketplace benefits less the channel costs. In addition, we find that the buyer is likely to have a bigger trading network with an e-market than with an extranet in order to capture the greatest available benefits. Overall, this study offers guidelines for managers to design and select e-procurement channels to fit different procurement needs.

In this study, we examine how competitive strategy affects firm-level stock liquidity. Following Porter’s (1980) classification of generic strategies, we categorize firms into differentiators and cost leaders, where differentiators aim to differentiate themselves by delivering unique products and services while cost leaders attempt to achieve a low-cost position through efficient cost control. We hypothesize that firms emphasizing differentiation strategies show higher stock liquidity than those adopting cost leadership strategies because differentiators attract more investor attention and trading activities due to their larger growth potential. Employing a competitive strategy measure developed by a machine-learning-based natural language processing approach of Seed-Words plus Word2Vec Similarity Word Extension, we find results supporting our hypothesis among China’s A-share listed firms. Additional analyses suggest that differentiators may improve stock liquidity by enhancing earnings quality, increasing asset liquidity, and reducing information asymmetry. Overall, our study highlights the importance of strategic positioning in improving the stock market performance.

Online portals provide personalization for “free”since the information acquired from consumers' usage of these services is valuable for advertising and targeted marketing purposes. Consumers' usage of services is determined by the tradeoff between their marginal value for personalized services and the resulting information privacy concerns and is captured by their personalization for privacy (P4P) ratio. A portal's decision to offer personalized services is dependent upon its cost of offering the services and revenue due to advertisers' marginal value for information (MVI) acquired therein. Through three models, our paper examines the strategic interaction between a portal that determines the service level to be offered and advertisers who pay the portal for placing advertisements through which they acquire information. Our first model of an independent portal finds that while all profits are increasing in the advertiser's MVI, with increasing P4P ratio the advertiser's profits are increasing at a faster rate than the portal's profits. In our second model, we consider an information sharing regime between two advertisers and find that a high MVI advertiser has a distinct first-mover advantage in announcing the services rate for the entire market. Our final model considers a portal that has its own advertising capabilities and we find that while this case is superior to others in the high MVI advertiser's and portal's profits, the consumer welfare and overall social welfare is dependent on the relative valuations of the two advertisers.

In this study, we build an economic model to explore the user-generated content (UGC) subsidy issue in the context of two-sided UGC platforms. Most UGC platforms subsidize content providers to encourage them to provide more content with higher quality. However, are these subsidies effective? Which type of subsidy is more effective? Here, we examine and compare the effectiveness of different types of subsides for UGC platforms. First, although the underlying reasons are different, both quantity and attention subsidies can induce users to provide more content with higher quality. Second, given the same level of small subsidy, the attention subsidy is more effective in encouraging better UGC quantity and quality. Third, the optimal subsidy level positively depends on the content provider’s sensitivity to the subsidy. In most cases, the magnitude of the optimal quantity subsidy should be larger than that of the optimal attention subsidy. Finally, to maintain or improve UGC quality, the platform should set a threshold to restrict the amount of content accessible to viewers. Doing so can prevent content providers from offering more content at the expense of content quality.

Web services have emerged as a prominent paradigm for the development of distributed software systems as they provide the potential for software to be modularized in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). This paper examines an extension of this paradigm to encompass ‘Grid Services’, which enables software capabilities to be recast with an operational focus and support a heterogeneous mix of business software and data, termed a Business Grid—“the grid of semantic services”. The current industrial representation of services is predominantly syntactic however, lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of any semantically-oriented Grid. Consequently, the use of semantic technology in support of business software heterogeneity is investigated as a likely tool to support a diverse and distributed software inventory and user. Service discovery architecture is therefore developed that is (a) distributed in form, (2) supports distributed service knowledge and (3) automatically extends service knowledge (as greater descriptive precision is inferred from the operating application system). This discovery engine is used to execute several real-word scenarios in order to develop and test a framework for engineering such grid service knowledge. The examples presented comprise software components taken from a group of Investment Banking systems. Resulting from the research is a framework for engineering service knowledge from operational enterprise systems for the purposes of service selection and subsequent reuse.

IT users are increasingly experienced at adapting technologies to their needs; resulting in the widespread use of workarounds and shadow IT. To ascertain the impact of job characteristics on this behavior, a survey was conducted among 415 IT users. The collected data underwent Reliability Analysis and Exploratory Factor Analysis in SPSS software. Subsequently, Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling were conducted with the SmartPLS software. The main results indicate that autonomy is strongly related to workaround behavior and shadow IT usage. Workaround behavior and shadow IT use have also been proven to be strongly related. However, the level of skill variety and task identity do not seem to significantly affect workaround behavior and shadow IT usage. Finally, this study’s findings demonstrate that both workaround behavior and shadow IT use are positively related to individual performance. Organizations are therefore encouraged to increase job autonomy in order to achieve enhanced individual performance by presenting workers with opportunities to adapt technologies in the form of workarounds and shadow IT. The use of such alternative solutions provides for faster and more dynamic communication and thus boosts collaboration among co-workers, external partners, and clients.