Information strategies and the theory of the Firm

Information costs play a key role in determining the relative efficiency of alternative organisational structures. The choice of locations at which information is stored in a firm is an important determinant of its information costs. A specific example of information use is modelled in order to explore what factors determine whether information should be stored centrally or locally and if it should be replicated at different sites. This provides insights into why firms are structured hierarchically, with some decisions and tasks being performed centrally and others at different levels of decentralisation. The effects of new information technologies are also discussed. These can radically alter the patterns and levels of information costs within a firm and so can cause substantial changes in organisational structure.

A gestalt generated from grounded theory concerning intuition in IS research

Intuition is an important and under-researched concept in information systems. Prior exploratory research has shown that that there is potential to characterize the use of intuition in academic information systems research. This paper extends this research to all of the available issues of two leading IS journals with the aim of reaching an approximation of theoretical saturation. Specifically, the entire text of MISQ and ISR was reviewed for the years 1990 through 2009 using searchable PDF versions of these publications. All references to intuition were coded on a basis consistent with Grounded Theory, interpreted as a gestalt and represented as a mind-map. In the period 1990-2009, 681 incidents of the use of "intuition", and related terms were found in the articles reviewed, representing a greater range of codes than prior research. In addition, codes were assigned to all issues of MIS Quarterly from commencement of publication to the end of the 2012 publication year to support the conjecture that coding saturation has been approximated. The most prominent use of the term of "intuition" was coded as "Intuition as Authority" in which intuition was used to validate a statement, research objective or a finding; representing approximately 34 per cent of codes assigned. In research articles where mathematical analysis was presented, researchers not infrequently commented on the degree to which a mathematical formulation was "intuitive"; this was the second most common coding representing approximately 16 per cent of the codes. The possibly most impactful use of the term "intuition" was "Intuition as Outcome", representing approximately 7 per cent of all coding, which characterized research results as adding to the intuitive understanding of a research topic or phenomena.This research aims to contribute to a greater theoretical understanding of the use of intuition in academic IS research publications. It provides potential benefits to practitioners by providing insight into the use of intuition in IS management, for example, emphasizing the emerging importance of "intuitive technology". Research directions include the creation of reflective and/or formative constructs for intuition in information systems research and the expansion of this novel research method to additional IS academic publications and topics.

Design of delay-tolerant space–time codes with limited feedback

In cooperative communication networks, owing to the nodes' arbitrary geographical locations and individual oscillators, the system is fundamentally asynchronous. Such a timing mismatch may cause rank deficiency of the conventional space-time codes and, thus, performance degradation. One efficient way to overcome such an issue is the delay-tolerant space-time codes (DT-STCs). The existing DT-STCs are designed assuming that the transmitter has no knowledge about the channels. In this paper, we show how the performance of DT-STCs can be improved by utilizing some feedback information. A general framework for designing DT-STC with limited feedback is first proposed, allowing for flexible system parameters such as the number of transmit/receive antennas, modulated symbols, and the length of codewords. Then, a new design method is proposed by combining Lloyd's algorithm and the stochastic gradient-descent algorithm to obtain optimal codebook of STCs, particularly for systems with linear minimum-mean-square-error receiver. Finally, simulation results confirm the performance of the newly designed DT-STCs with limited feedback.