Design Of Information Environments Research Articles

Rivals without a cause? Relative performance feedback creates destructive competition despite aligned incentives

AbstractWhether people compete or cooperate with each other has consequences for their own performance and that of organizations. To explain why people compete or cooperate, previous research has focused on two main factors: situational outcome structures and personality types. Here, we propose that—above and beyond these two factors—situational cues, such as the format in which people receive feedback, strongly affect whether they act competitively, cooperatively, or individualistically. Results of a laboratory experiment support our theorizing: After receiving ranking feedback, both students and experienced managers treated group situations with cooperative outcome structures as competitive and were in consequence willing to forgo guaranteed financial gains to pursue a—financially irrelevant—better rank. Conversely, in dilemma situations, feedback based on the joint group outcome led to more cooperation than ranking feedback. Our study contributes to research on competition, cooperation, interdependence theory, forced ranking, and the design of information environments.

Data quality assessment in context: A cognitive perspective

In organizations today, the risk of poor information quality is becoming increasingly high as larger and more complex information resources are being collected and managed. To mitigate this risk, decision makers assess the quality of the information provided by their IS systems in order to make effective decisions based on it. To do so, they may rely on quality metadata: objective quality measurements tagged by data managers onto the information used by decision makers. Decision makers may also gauge information quality on their own, subjectively and contextually assessing the usefulness of the information for solving the specific task at hand. Although information quality has been defined as fitness for use, models of information quality assessment have thus far tended to ignore the impact of contextual quality on information use and decision outcomes. Contextual assessments can be as important as objective quality indicators because they can affect which information gets used for decision making tasks. This research offers a theoretical model for understanding users' contextual information quality assessment processes. The model is grounded in dual-process theories of human cognition, which enable simultaneous evaluation of both objective and contextual information quality attributes. Findings of an exploratory laboratory experiment suggest that the theoretical model provides an avenue for understanding contextual aspects of information quality assessment in concert with objective ones. The model offers guidance for the design of information environments that can improve performance by integrating both objective and subjective aspect of users' quality assessments.