| Date |
Speaker |
Title |
Description |
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Jan. 11, 2024
3:00-4:30pm
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Sabine Brunswicker (Purdue University) |
The Impact of Empathy in Conversational AI: A Controlled Experiment with a Legal Chatbot
|
The rise of ChatGPT has revealed the potential of chatbots and other conversational AI tools to assist humans in fields such as law and healthcare, where the best human experts can engage in empathetic conversations. Our research aims to develop and empirically test a theory of empathy in the language displayed by conversational AI, explaining the relational outcomes of human-AI conversations in terms of cognitive effort, helpfulness, and trustworthiness. Using this theory, a chatbot is designed using syntactic and rhetorical linguistic elements that evoke empathy when providing legal services to tenants renting property. Through a randomized controlled experiment with a 2 by 3 factorial design, the effects of this empathetic chatbot on three relational outcomes in human-AI conversations are examined and compared to a non-empathetic chatbot that maintains the same logic. A baseline model utilizing non-conversational access to legal services via frequently asked questions ("FAQs") is also implemented, and the subjects' emotional state (anger) is manipulated as a moderating factor. The study involves 277 participants randomly assigned to one of six groups. The findings demonstrate the significance of both main and interaction effects on trustworthiness, usefulness, and cognitive effort. The results indicate that subtle changes in language syntax and style can have substantial implications for the outcomes of human-AI conversations. These findings contribute to the growing literature on conversational AI and have practical implications for the design of conversational and generative AI. |
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Feb 8, 2024
3:00-4:30pm
|
Eleu Ellinger (Stockholm School of Economics) |
Skin the the Game: The Transformational Potential of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
|
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) – collectively owned human-machine systems deployed on a blockchain that self-govern through smart contracts and the voluntary contributions of autonomous community members – exhibit potential to facilitate collective action in managing digital commons. Yet, the promise of decentralization and collective action is difficult to sustain. To this end, this paper critically examines the transformational potential of DAOs in the case of decentralized finance. Using a polycentric governance lens, we contribute to the literature on technology-enabled forms of organizing with a model explaining the transformational potential of DAOs to facilitate collective action in digital commons. Our study highlights that (1) DAOs are a new form of organizing enabled by blockchain technology in which individuals are free to pursue their objectives within a general system of rules enforced by smart contracts, (2) collective action for managing digital commons can be sustained through a set of three mechanisms – sustained participation, collective direction, and scaled organizing, and (3) DAOs tend to strike a balance between centralized and fully decentralized or community-based governance by implementing a polycentric governance system involving a combination of human and machine agency that creates skin in the game. |
|
March 6, 2024
3:00-4:30pm
|
Tobias Kircher (TU Munich) |
Privacy Regulation and Learners’ Access to App-based Education – Evidence from Children’s Privacy
|
Policymakers contemplate completely prohibiting third-party tracking. Whether a prohibition would hinder learners’ access to app-based education has remained obscure. In general, we are still in the process of fully understanding the costs of privacy regulation, in particular potential social costs. Adverse social repercussions could change how we think of privacy regulation. There are two plausible but theoretically uncertain monetization-related reactions by app developers that would hinder learners’ access to app-based education: the erection of paywalls, which would limit the free of charge access, and the escalation of the volume among apps remaining free, which would indirectly hinder learners’ access by distracting learners and degrading the usability of education apps. We study in a difference-in-differences analysis the free access and usability consequences of Apple’s 2019 prohibition of third-party tracking in child-directed education apps. We find that the prohibition, on average, reduced the likelihood that a child-directed education app is free by 1.7 percent. We also discover that the prohibition degraded the usability of child-directed education apps remaining free of charge. The degraded usability can be attributed to the escalation of the ad volume causing distraction. Among the apps that got less usable are apps directed to learners with special educational needs. These findings push forward the frontiers of knowledge of the consequences of privacy regulation and the pricing consequences of the regulation of the digital economy and inform policymakers about the adverse social repercussions of strengthening data privacy. Firms could increase the product rating, a critical success factor, by relinquishing advertisements. |
|
May 2, 2024
3:00-4:30pm
|
Gregory Vial (HEC Montréal) |
A Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective of Software Reuse in the Digital Age: An Agenda for IS Research
|
Software is instrumental to the accelerated pace of digital innovation, and our ability to rapidly develop and deliver digital products and services is largely based on the reuse of existing software. In recent years, packaged software reuse has emerged as an important phenomenon driving the creation of new software, both proprietary and open source, as well as the emergence and evolution of entire software ecosystems. Arguing that our theoretical understanding of the nature and the magnitude of current packaged software reuse practice remains limited, our objective with this research commentary is twofold. First, we draw attention to the importance of packaged software reuse and its relevance as a promising phenomenon of interest for information systems (IS) researchers. Second, we mobilize the concept of generativity to conceptualize packaged software as a form of technological innovation that fosters large-scale (re)combination and propose complex adaptive systems (CAS) as a theoretical foundation to help us engage with the current nature of the phenomenon. Using key principles of CAS as the generative foundation for our conceptual scaffolding, we offer a research framework for packaged software reuse and develop an agenda for IS research organized across three main axes. For each axis, we outline relevant research themes and research questions leveraging the nature of software as objects constituted of other pieces of software developed and maintained by heterogeneous groups of software developers. Shedding light on the renewed role of software reuse, our work contributes to ongoing conversations on generativity and software ecosystems as well as the design of digital products and services.
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June 6, 2024
3:00-4:30pm
|
Sebastian Krakowski (Stockholm School of Economics)
|
Generative AI and Decision Making: Experiences from the Classroom and Theoretical Implications |
The seminar will explore the impact of Generative AI (GenAI) on work and organizations. It will discuss findings from classroom experiments integrating GenAI into entrepreneurship education and build on them to outline suggested implications for theory on AI in management.
Experiments integrating GenAI into entrepreneurship education in US and European courses revealed how it can augment human abilities in innovative problem-solving, enable rapid learning through experimentation, and enhance communication skills in negotiation and pitching. The findings also highlight behavioral aspects of GenAI adoption and suggest that novel skill development and psychological safety may be necessary conditions for successfully leveraging this technology.
Building on these findings, four key dimensions of GenAI are proposed, which distinguish it from predictive AI and other preceding disruptive technologies: (i) its comparatively broader applicability as a general-purpose technology; (ii) its ability to catalyze exploratory and combinatorial innovation; (iii) its capacity to enhance cognitive diversity and decision-making; and (iv) its democratizing effect on AI adoption and value creation. Understanding these dimensions is crucial for studying and guiding the implementation of GenAI in organizations and society.
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Sept. 4, 2024
3:00-4:30pm
|
David Bendig (University of Muenster) |
Attention to Digital Innovation: Exploring the Impact of a Chief Information Officer in the Top Management Team |
We draw on the attention-based view of the firm to examine whether and when the presence of a CIO in the TMT has a positive effect on both firms’ ideated digital innovation (IDI) (i.e., the intensity of firms’ digital patenting activity) and commercialized digital innovation (CDI) (i.e., the digital sophistication of firms’ new products). Building on the idea that attention processes are context dependent, we also explore the moderating roles of CEO characteristics (IT background and role tenure) as well as environmental characteristics (the industry’s IT attention). We analyze data from a cross-industry panel of U.S. S&P 500 firms over eight years that includes up to 2,852 firm-year observations. The results indicate that CIO presence in the TMT is positively related to a firm’s IDI and CDI. Furthermore, they show that the organizational context related to CEO characteristics moderates the CIO-CDI relationship and that the environmental context related to the industry’s IT attention moderates the CIO-IDI relationship. Our research contributes to the information systems literature by providing robust evidence that CIO presence in the TMT positively influences a firm’s digital innovation outcomes, showing how internal and external boundary conditions affect the work of CIOs, and elaborating the role of managerial attention as an underlying mechanism explaining digital innovation. |
|
Oct. 24, 2024
3:00-4:30pm
|
Roxana Ologeanu-Taddei (TBS Education, France) |
IT consumerization and the paradox between autonomy and professional self-governance in healthcare
|
IT consumerization has become a going concern for managers and researchers alike given that the use of consumer IT in organizational contexts has far-reaching reverberations on the organizational level. Our paper advances this discussion through emphasizing that IT consumerization in professional work in healthcare is inherently paradoxical. Our evidence shows that in these settings IT consumerization raises and interconnects professional autonomy and governance as contradictory and interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and continue over time. More specifically, we find that professional autonomy enables doctors to use personal IT devices and software that they find convenient for their work, but the widespread use of such devices also drives professionals’ efforts to govern this work through establishing professional norms that limit professional autonomy to a certain extent. Using an inductive approach, we show how professionals navigate this paradox by creating collective norms to balance digital representations' quality, but the tensions persist as IT devices evolve and different medical specialties require varying judgments.
The contributions of the study include enriching the IT consumerization literature by addressing the paradox raised in decision-making among professionals.
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Nov. 14, 2024
3:00-4:30pm
|
Satish Nambisan (Case Western Reserve University) |
TBA |
TBA |