Search results

Information behaviour exists in two forms: first when information is sought with a clear purpose and second, when we encounter it accidentally or serendipitiously. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the information encountering (IE) and encountered information sharing (EIS) behaviour of research students in an online environment.

The quantitative research approach was applied to carry out this research. The authors selected 120 MPhil and PhD research students (who research information as a part of their assignments) from six departments as sample for the study. Out of 120 research students, 93 returned the filled questionnaires. The collected data were analysed in SPSS version 22. First, descriptive statistics to estimate the IE and sharing behaviour; and later one-way ANOVA and post hoc comparisons using the Tukey HSD tests were applied to investigate the EIS based on the frequency of internet usage.

The findings indicate that the mean scores of the responses remain between “sometimes” and “often”, in all the behavioural sub-constructs of the model of IE, i.e. noticing, stopping, examining, capturing, storing (keeping), sharing and returning. The extended model proved to be valid in an online environment in the context of Pakistani culture. While estimating EIS, the results indicated significantly higher sharing and large effect size among the research students who used the internet from 11 to 15 h a week than those who used it between 6 and 10 h.

Keeping in view the results the research students and parent organisations (universities) working for the improvement of research ranking and research students’ better performance, should know that research information is not only actively acquired but also huge amount of information is accidentally encountered and shared. Therefore, the universities should train their research students to enhance the information sharing of encountered information. That will promote the research culture and may enhance the speed of learning, research work and ultimately result in competitive advantage, without any extra effort.

This is the first study of its type in Pakistan to measure the IE behaviour of research students in an online environment. Moreover, it is the first study which investigates the extended model of IE using a quantitative approach in the Pakistani research environment, which originated in Japan via qualitative research approach.

Drawing on transaction cost economics (TCE) and social exchange theory (SET), the purpose of this paper is to explain why and how external environment, governance structures and interpersonal relationships influence information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled information sharing in supply chains (SCs) of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from developing economies.

The authors adopt a theory-building approach using a multiple case study design, including four SMEs operating in SCs from two developing economies (i.e. Republic of North Macedonia and People’s Republic of China), in which the authors conduct both within-case and cross-case analyses.

Social bonds (known as vrski in Macedonian and guanxi in Chinese) were found to govern buyer–supplier exchanges by supporting the establishment of personal trust and the reduction of distrust. These social bonds compensate for the institutional deficiencies in developing economies and thus encourage ICT-enabled information sharing by SMEs in their SCs.

By applying the theoretical perspectives of TCE and SET to the cross-case analysis, the authors develop nine propositions to explain ICT-enabled information sharing and its interdependencies with external environment, governance structures and interpersonal relationships in developing economies. Further research is recommended to refine and test the generalizability of the theoretical model.

Firms have to develop and nurture social bonds with their suppliers from developing economies to reduce risks related to the environmental uncertainty and institutional voids. This can increase trust and decrease distrust associated with ICT-enabled information sharing.

The study examines why and how external environment (environmental uncertainty and institutional environment), social bonds (vrski and guanxi) and interpersonal mechanisms (trust and distrust) influence ICT-enabled information sharing of SMEs operating in developing economies.

Despite the wave of enthusiasm for building information modelling (BIM) as a platform for information sharing, issues from the context of information-sharing behaviours still exist. The purpose of this paper is to explore the behavioural factors for successful information sharing in BIM projects in Malaysia.

Based on a literature review, a questionnaire was designed containing seven identified behavioural factors and their sub-elements. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey with 42 experienced BIM practitioners. In addition to that qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine construction practitioners in the Malaysian construction industry. Initially, a descriptive statistical analysis was adopted, followed by multivariate analysis that was employed to examine the possible effect of demographic attributes (i.e. nature of organisation and work experience in BIM) on the behavioural factors.

The analytical results indicated that communication, accountability and trust were the top three behavioural factors influencing successful information sharing. Additionally, the majority of the behavioural factors on information sharing were found to be not significantly dependent on both, the nature of organisations and the level of BIM experiences. Overall, the success of information sharing in the digital environment (i.e. BIM) depends on organisational behaviour supported by the collaborative constructs.

Due to the fact that BIM implementation in Malaysia is still in its infancy, this study was limited to local context with small-scale BIM practitioners. Therefore, their views may not represent all BIM-related stakeholders in the industry.

The success of information sharing in BIM projects is a result of a combination of various factors, and this study provides construction practitioners with information on the behavioural factors, which could assist them in creating collective and collaborative information sharing in a digital environment.

Despite the fact that this study is country specific, the paper presents a new perspective on the behavioural context of information sharing in BIM projects. The findings further extend the current BIM literature by providing an insight into what it takes for project teams to reinforce their information sharing in the Malaysian digital environment through improvements in behaviours.

Crowding in service environments is a constant concern for many firms due to the negative consequences it has on consumers and companies alike. Yet, scant empirical research exists on firm-generated initiatives aimed at improving customer service experiences in crowded situations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how information, a managerially actionable variable, influences social interactions (in the form of customer social withdrawal and citizenship behavior) and service experience.

Two experimental studies were conducted using an extended service context.

This research demonstrates that receiving information about crowds in advance results in heightened social withdrawal, which improves customer service experience. However, providing consumers with a platform to share crowding information increases customers’ citizenship behavior toward service employees and other customers, which, in turn, improves customer service experience.

For extended service encounters (e.g. air travel) where social interactions are inevitable, companies should encourage customers to share their real-time experiences with other customers in hopes of creating more positive social interactions (e.g. citizenship behavior) within the crowded environment.

Existing investigations of crowding stem from an overemphasis on the physical and atmospheric aspects of the environment by treating crowds as a “fixture” in the servicescape, rather than as “active participants” involved in the crowding environment. While the mere presence of crowds alone has negative effects, this research takes it a step further by examining interactions among and between customers and service employees within the crowded service environment.

The objective of this paper is to investigate how firms react to cybersecurity information sharing environment where government organizations disseminate cybersecurity threat information gathered by individual firms to the private entities. The overall impact of information sharing on firms' cybersecurity investment decision has only been game-theoretically explored, not giving practical implication. The authors therefore leverage the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA) to observe firms' attitudinal changes toward investing in cybersecurity.

The authors design a quasi-experiment where they set US cybersecurity firms as an experimental group (a proxy for total investment in cybersecurity) and nonsecurity firms as a control group to measure the net effect of CISA on overall cybersecurity investment. To enhance the robustness of the authors’ difference-in-difference estimation, the authors employed propensity score matched sample test and reduced sample test as well.

For the full sample, the authors’ empirical findings suggest that US security firms' overall performance (i.e. Tobin's Q) improved following the legislation, which indicates that more investment in cybersecurity was followed by the formation of information sharing environment. Interestingly, big cybersecurity firms are beneficiaries of the CISA when the full samples are divided into small and large group. Both Tobin's Q and sales growth rate increased for big firms after CISA.

The authors’ findings shed more light on the research stream of cybersecurity and information sharing, a research area only explored by game-theoretical approaches. Given that the US government has tried to enforce cybersecurity defensive measures by building cooperative architecture such as CISA 2015, the policy implication of this study is far-reaching.

The authors’ study contributes to the research on the economic benefits of sharing cybersecurity information by finding the missing link (i.e. empirical evidence) between “sharing” and “economic impact.” This paper confirms that CISA affects the cybersecurity industry unevenly by firm size, a previously unidentified relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss the most important research areas on information sharing in supply chains and related risks, taking into account their evolution over time. This paper sheds light on what is happening today and what the trajectories for the future are, with particular respect to the implications for supply chain management.

The dynamic literature review method called Systematic Literature Network Analysis (SLNA) was adopted. It combines the Systematic Literature Review approach and bibliographic network analyses, and it relies on objective measures and algorithms to perform quantitative literature-based detection of emerging topics.

The focus of the literature seems to be on threats that are internal to the extended supply chain rather than on external attacks, such as viruses, traditionally related to information technology (IT). The main arising risk appears to be the intentional or non-intentional leakage of information. Also, papers analyze the implications for information sharing coming from “soft” factors such as trust and collaboration among supply chain partners. Opportunities are also highlighted and include how information sharing can be leveraged to confront disruptions and increase resilience.

The adopted methodology allows for providing an original perspective on the investigated topic, that is, how information sharing in supply chains and related risks are evolving over time because of the turbulent advances in technology.

Emergent and highly critical risks related to information sharing are highlighted to support the design of supply chain risks strategies. Also, critical areas to the development of “beyond-the-dyad” initiatives to manage information sharing risks emerge. Opportunities coming from information sharing that are less known and exploited by companies are provided.

This paper focuses on the supply chain perspective rather than the traditional IT-based view of information sharing. According to this perspective, this paper provides a dynamic representation of the literature on the investigated topic. This is an important contribution to the topic of information sharing in supply chains is continuously evolving and shaping new supply chain models.

Browsing knowledge documents in a peer-to-peer (P2P) environment is difficult because knowledge documents in such an environment are large in quantity and distributed over different peers who organize the documents according to their own views. This paper aims to propose a method for constructing a personal knowledge map for a peer to facilitate knowledge browsing and alleviate information overload in P2P environments.

The research presents a method for constructing a personal knowledge map. The method adopts an ontology-concept-tree-based classification algorithm to recognize a peer’s personal knowledge structure and construct a personal knowledge map, and uses a self-organizing map algorithm to cluster and visualize the knowledge documents. The correctness of the created knowledge map is evaluated with a collection of abstracts of academic papers.

The method for constructing a personal knowledge map is the main finding of this research. The evaluation shows that the created knowledge map is good in quality.

The proposed method provides a way for P2P platforms to understand their users’ knowledge background, as well as to improve the P2P platform environment. However, the proposed method will not help a peer when he has nothing in his individual knowledge document repository (i.e. the “cold start” problem). The method also requires a relatively good ontology base for a P2P document sharing system to use the method effectively.

It is novel that the proposed method organizes the knowledge documents related to a peer’s knowledge background into a personal knowledge map. Moreover, the created knowledge map combines the advantages of a hierarchical display and a map display. It has values for a distributed P2P environment to facilitate users’ knowledge browsing and to alleviate information overload.

Sharing expertise is a growing field of interest because of the increased amount of available information, turnover of experts and globalization of companies. Sharing expertise is a difficult task; therefore, experts often lack motivation, skills and time to document their expertise. The developed expertise cycle is a framework where knowledge stewards build personal trusted relationships with experts. Knowledge stewards interview the experts, construct the knowledge and document it, making it available for knowledge seekers. The expertise cycle is tested in two cases where the expertise is distributed to different individuals and business units. In both cases the usage of the expertise cycle was expanded. As a conclusion, the usage of the expertise cycle and described best practices are recommended. Instead of providing more information we should concentrate on providing better quality of information – and the expertise cycle is a valuable method to achieve this goal.

Sharing project information is critical for the success of medical crowdfunding campaigns. However, few users share medical crowdfunding projects on their social networks, and the sharing behavior of medical crowdfunding projects on social networking sites has not been well studied. Therefore, this study explored the factors and potential mechanisms influencing users’ sharing behaviors on networking sites.

A research model was developed based on the attribution-affect model of helping and social capital theory. Data were collected using a longitudinal survey. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to analyze the collected data. We conducted post hoc analyses to validate the results of the quantitative analysis.

The analysis results verified the effects of perceived external attribution, perceived uncontrollable attributions, and perceived unstable attributions on sympathy and identified the effect of sympathy and social characteristics of medical crowdfunding users on sharing behavior.

This research provides a comprehensive theoretical understanding of users’ sharing behavior characteristics and provides implications for enhancing the efficiency of medical crowdfunding activities.

Based on structural embeddedness theory and resource dependence theory, this research aims to examine the mediation role of information sharing in the relationship between deendency structures and electronic supply chain management system (eSCM) adoption and a firm's intention to adopt eSCMs.

A survey questionnaire was undertaken from 212 companies based in Mainland China. Three-stage least squares (3SLS) regression was employed to test the research model.

The results from 3SLS regressions showed that the effect of interdependence on eSCM adoption intention is fully mediated through information sharing when relationship duration is either below or about the mean. Interdependence and dependence disadvantage was shown to have significant positive effects on eSCM adoption while the effect of dependence advantage was statistically insignificant. Relationship duration was found to negatively moderate the relationship between information sharing and adoption intention.

Through investigating factors of inter-organizational relationships, this study fills the knowledge gap in the traditional paradigms which ignore the collaborative nature of eSCM and analyse related problems based on a single firm's point of view.