Digital technologies have made the line of visibility more transparent, enabling customers to get deeper insights into an organization’s core operations than ever before. This creates new challenges for organizations trying to consistently deliver high-quality customer experiences. In this paper we conduct an empirical analysis of customers’ preferences and their willingness-to-pay for different degrees of process transparency, using the example of digitally-enabled business-to-customer delivery services. Applying conjoint analysis, we quantify customers’ preferences and willingness-to-pay for different service attributes and levels. Our contributions are two-fold: For research, we provide empirical measurements of customers’ preferences and their willingness-to-pay for process transparency, suggesting that more is not always better. Additionally, we provide a blueprint of how conjoint analysis can be applied to study design decisions regarding changing an organization’s digital line of visibility. For practice, our findings enable service managers to make decisions about process transparency and establishing different levels of service quality.

Optimal decision making requires appropriate evaluation of advice. Recent literature reports that algorithm aversion reduces the effectiveness of predictive algorithms. However, it remains unclear how people recover from bad advice given by an otherwise good advisor. Previous work has focused on algorithm aversion at a single time point. We extend this work by examining successive decisions in a time series forecasting task using an online between-subjects experiment (N = 87). Our empirical results do not confirm algorithm aversion immediately after bad advice. The estimated effect suggests an increasing algorithm appreciation over time. Our work extends the current knowledge on algorithm aversion with insights into how weight on advice is adjusted over consecutive tasks. Since most forecasting tasks are not one-off decisions, this also has implications for practitioners.

Explainability for machine learning gets more and more important in high-stakes decisions like real estate appraisal. While traditional hedonic house pricing models are fed with hard information based on housing attributes, recently also soft information has been incorporated to increase the predictive performance. This soft information can be extracted from image data by complex models like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, these are intransparent which excludes their use for high-stakes financial decisions. To overcome this limitation, we examine if a two-stage modeling approach can provide explainability. We combine visual interpretability by Regression Activation Maps (RAM) for the CNN and a linear regression for the overall prediction. Our experiments are based on 62.000 family homes in Philadelphia and the results indicate that the CNN learns aspects related to vegetation and quality aspects of the house from exterior images, improving the predictive accuracy of real estate appraisal by up to 5.4%.

Accurate real estate appraisal is essential in decision making processes of financial institutions, governments, and trending real estate platforms like Zillow. One of the most important factors of a property’s value is its location. However, creating accurate quantifications of location remains a challenge. While traditional approaches rely on Geographical Information Systems (GIS), recently unstructured data in form of images was incorporated in the appraisal process, but text data remains an untapped reservoir. Our study shows that using text data in form of geolocated Wikipedia articles can increase predictive performance over traditional GIS-based methods by 8.2% in spatial out-of-sample validation. A framework to automatically extract geographically weighted vector representations for text is established and used alongside traditional structural housing features to make predictions and to uncover local patterns on sale price for real estate transactions between 2015 and 2020 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is currently an important topic for the application of Machine Learning (ML) in high-stakes decision scenarios. Related research focuses on evaluating ML algorithms in terms of interpretability. However, providing a human understandable explanation of an intelligent system does not only relate to the used ML algorithm. The data and features used also have a considerable impact on interpretability. In this paper, we develop a taxonomy for describing XAI systems based on aspects about the algorithm and data. The proposed taxonomy gives researchers and practitioners opportunities to describe and evaluate current XAI systems with respect to interpretability and guides the future development of this class of systems.

Existing process mining methods are primarily designed for processes that have reached a high degree of digitalization and standardization. In contrast, the literature has only begun to discuss how process mining can be applied to knowledge-intensive processes—such as product innovation processes—that involve creative activities, require organizational flexibility, depend on single actors’ decision autonomy, and target process-external goals such as customer satisfaction. Due to these differences, existing Process Mining methods cannot be applied out-of-the-box to analyze knowledge-intensive processes. In this paper, we employ Action Design Research (ADR) to design and evaluate a process mining approach for knowledge-intensive processes. More specifically, we draw on the two processes of product innovation and engineer-to-order in manufacturing contexts. We collected data from 27 interviews and conducted 49 workshops to evaluate our IT artifact at different stages in the ADR process. From a theoretical perspective, we contribute five design principles and a conceptual artifact that prescribe how process mining ought to be designed for knowledge-intensive processes in manufacturing. From a managerial perspective, we demonstrate how enacting these principles enables their application in practice.

In recent years, many cases of deep neural networks failing dramatically when faced with adversarial or real-world examples have been reported. Such failures, which are quite hard to detect, are often related to a generalization problem known as shortcut learning. Yet, with state-of-the-art transformer models now being ubiquitous in financial text mining, one cannot help but wonder how reliable the results conveyed in the ever-growing literature genuinely are. Against this background, we expose, in this work, how vulnerable contemporary financial text mining approaches are to shortcut learning. Focussing on the common learning task of financial sentiment classification, we assess, using two entity-based sampling strategies and our publicly-available dataset, the discrepancies between i.i.d. and o.o.d. performance estimates of four transformer models. Our results reveal that o.o.d. performance estimates are consistently weaker than those of their i.i.d. counterparts, with the error rate increasing by as much as 29.7%, thus, demonstrating how this issue can, when overlooked, lead to misleading evaluations. Moreover, we show how additional preprocessing steps, such as entity removal and vocabulary filtering, can help reduce the effects of shortcut learning by filtering out entity-related linguistic cues.

Our world is more connected than ever before. Sadly, however, this highly connected world has made it easier to bully, insult, and propagate hate speech on the cyberspace. Even though researchers and companies alike have started investigating this real-world problem, the question remains as to why users are increasingly being exposed to hate and discrimination online. In fact, the noticeable and persistent increase in harmful language on social media platforms indicates that the situation is, actually, only getting worse. Hence, in this work, we show that contemporary ML methods can help tackle this challenge in an accurate and cost-effective manner. Our experiments demonstrate that a universal approach combining transfer learning methods and state-of-the-art Transformer architectures can trigger the efficient development of toxic language detection models. Consequently, with this universal approach, we provide platform providers with a simplistic approach capable of enabling the automated moderation of user-generated content, and as a result, hope to contribute to making the web a safer place.

Now accounting for more than 80% of a firm's worth, brands have become essential assets for modern organizations. However, methods and techniques for the monetary valuation of brands are still under-researched. Hence, the objective of this study is to evaluate the utility of explanatory statistical models and machine learning approaches for explaining and predicting brand value. Drawing upon the case of the most valuable English football brands during the 2016/17 to 2020/21 seasons, we demonstrate how to operationalize Aaker's (1991) theoretical brand equity framework to collect meaningful qualitative and quantitative feature sets. Our explanatory models can explain up to 77% of the variation in brand valuations across all clubs and seasons, while our predictive approach can predict out-of-sample observations with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 14%. Future research can build upon our results to develop domain-specific brand valuation methods while enabling managers to make better-informed investment decisions.

Over the last years, several approaches for the data-driven estimation of expected possession value (EPV) in basketball and association football (soccer) have been proposed. In this paper, we develop and evaluate PIVOT: the first such framework for team handball. Accounting for the fast-paced, dynamic nature and relative data scarcity of hand- ball, we propose a parsimonious end-to-end deep learning architecture that relies solely on tracking data. This efficient approach is capable of predicting the probability that a team will score within the near future given the fine-grained spatio-temporal distribution of all players and the ball over the last seconds of the game. Our experiments indicate that PIVOT is able to produce accurate and calibrated probability estimates, even when trained on a relatively small dataset. We also showcase two interactive applications of PIVOT for valuing actual and counterfactual player decisions and actions in real-time.

In early 2021, the finance world was taken by storm by the dramatic price surge of the GameStop Corp. stock. This rise is being, at least in part, attributed to a group of Redditors belonging to the now-famous r/wallstreetbets (WSB) subreddit group. In this work, we set out to address if user activity on the WSB subreddit is associated with the trading volume of the GME stock. Leveraging a unique dataset containing more than 4.9 million WSB posts and comments, we assert that user activity is associated with the trading volume of the GameStop stock. We further show that posts have a significantly higher predictive power than comments and are especially helpful for predicting unusually high trading volume. Lastly, as recent events have shown, we believe that these findings have implications for retail and institutional investors, trading platforms, and policymakers, as these can have disruptive potential.

In order to sustain their competitive advantage, data driven organizations must continue investing in business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) while mitigating inherent cost increases. Research shows that examining outlays by individual BI&A artifact (e.g. reports, analytics) is necessary, but introduction in practice is cumbersome and adoption is slow. BI&A service-oriented cost allocation (BIASOCA) represents an improvement to this situation. This approach enables to render the BI&A cost pool accountable and improves cost transparency, which leads to a higher BI&A penetration of economically viable applications in organizations. Against this background, this paper aims at designing and implementing BIASOCA in a medium-sized company. To record organizational impact and increase customer acceptance, this study is carried out as action design research (ADR). Our findings indicate improvements in BI&A management from working with consumers to locate cost savings and drivers. After invoicing, consumers’ BI&A awareness increased, releasing resources while also making a better understanding of BIASOCA necessary. We detail how to implement BIASOCA in a real-life setting and the challenges attendant in so doing. Our research contributes to theory and practice with a set of design principles highlighting, besides the accuracy of cost accounting, the importance of collaboration, model comprehensibility and strategic alignment.

Effective customer loyalty programs are essential for every company. Small and medium sized brick-and- mortar stores, such as bakeries, butcher and flower shops, often share a common overarching loyalty program, organized by a third-party provider. Furthermore, these small shops have limited resources and often cannot afford complex BI tools. Out of these reasons we investigated how traditional brick-and- mortar stores can benefit from an expansion of service functionalities of a loyalty card provider. To answer this question, we cooperated with a cross-industry customer loyalty program in a polycentric region. The loyalty program was transformed from simple card-based solution to a mobile app for customers and a web- application for shop owners. The new solution offers additional BI services for performing data analytics and strengthening the position of brick-and-mortar stores. Participating shops can work together in order to increase sales and align marketing campaigns. Therefore, shopping data from 12 years, 55 shops, and 19,000 customers was analyzed.

Historically, the field of financial forecasting almost exclusively relied on so-called hard information – i.e., numerical data with well-defined and unambiguous meaning. Over the last few decades, however, researchers and practitioners alike have, following the advances in natural language understanding, started recognizing the benefits of integrating soft information into financial modelling. In line with the above, this paper examines whether contemporary attention-based sequence-to-sequence models, known as Transformers, can help improve stock return volatility prediction when applied to corporate annual reports. Using a publicly available benchmark dataset, we show, in an empirical analysis, that out-of-the-box Transformer models have the ability to outmatch current state-of-the-art results and, more importantly, that our proposed feature-based Transformer approach can outperform a robust numerical baseline. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study focusing on stock return volatility prediction (1) to ever experiment with state-of-the-art Transformer architectures and (2) to demonstrate that a model based solely on soft information can surpass its numerical counterpart. Furthermore, we show that by including an additional numerical feature into our best text-only model, we can push the performance of our model even further, suggesting that soft and hard information contain different predictive signals.

Augmented Reality (AR) technologies have evolved rapidly over the last years, particularly with regard to user interfaces, input devices, and cameras used in mobile devices for object and gesture recognition. While early AR systems relied on pre-defined trigger images or QR code markers, modern AR applications leverage machine learning techniques to identify objects in their physical environments. So far, only few empirical studies have investigated AR's potential for supporting learning and task assistance using such marker-less AR. In order to address this research gap, we implemented an AR application (app)with the aim to analyze the effectiveness of marker-less AR applied in a mundane setting which can be used for on-the-job training and more formal educational settings. The results of our laboratory experiment show that while participants working with AR needed significantly more time to fulfill the given task, the participants who were supported by AR learned significantly more.

Data-driven decision making (DDD) refers to organizational decision-making practices that emphasize the use of data and statistical analysis instead of relying on human judgment only. Various empirical studies provide evidence for the value of DDD, both on individual decision maker level and the organizational level. Yet, the path from data to value is not always an easy one and various organizational and psychological factors mediate and moderate the translation of data-driven insights into better decisions and, subsequently, effective business actions. The current body of academic literature on DDD lacks prescriptive knowledge on how to successfully employ DDD in complex organizational settings. Against this background, this paper reports on an action design research study aimed at designing and implementing IT artifacts for DDD at one of the largest ship engine manufacturers in the world. Our main contribution is a set of design principles highlighting, besides decision quality, the importance of model comprehensibility, domain knowledge, and actionability of results.

Augmented Reality (AR) based teaching and learning has evolved rapidly over the past years. Re-searchers have shown that AR has the potential to deliver persuasive learning experiences in for-mal teaching (e.g., in classrooms) and in informal learning environments (e.g., museums). Howev-er, comparatively little extant research is firmly grounded in learning theories and applies rigor-ous empirical methods to evaluate the effect of AR on learning performance. In order to build a cumulative body of knowledge on AR-based instructional design and its effectiveness, it is neces-sary to consolidate both the theoretical foundations of and empirical evidence for using AR for teaching and learning. Against this background we conducted a focused systematic literature re-view on theoretical and empirical foundations of AR in education. We identify theory-based de-sign elements and empirical measures for developing and applying AR teaching and learning ap-plications and consolidate them in a design framework.

Emotions spread through online and offline social networks and subsequently influence individuals’ decisions and behaviours. Empirical studies on emotional contagion are almost non-existent in infor-mation systems research, leaving a gap in understanding how individuals are affected by emotions ex-pressed in online sources. Online newspaper articles and the associated readers’ comments provide a rich and mostly unfiltered data source that is utilized in this work to identify emotional contagion effects between newspaper publishers and its readers. By applying lexicon-based sentiment analysis and multi-level linear regression models to 1,151 online newspaper articles and 28,948 associated readers' com-ments, we model the relationships between sentiments in newspaper articles and comments. The results provide empirical support for emotional contagion effects between emotions expressed in online news-paper articles and emotions expressed in readers' comments. Linguistic, psychological and methodo-logical limitations are considered and discussed.

Recent growth in data volume, variety, and velocity led to an increased demand for high-performance data processing and analytics solutions. In-memory computing (IMC) enables organizations to boost their information processing capacity, and is widely acknowledged to be one of the leading strategic technologies in the field of enterprise systems. The majority of technology vendors now have IMC technologies in their portfolio, and the interest of companies in adopting such solutions in order to benefit from big data is increasing. Although there is first research on the business value of IMC in the form of case studies, there is a lack of large-scale quantitative evidence on the positive effect of such solutions on firm performance. Based on a unique panel data set of IMC adoption information and financial firm performance data for a sample of companies from the Fortune 500 list this study aims at explaining the relationship between the adoption of IMC solutions and firm performance. In this research-in-progress paper we discuss the theoretical background of our work, describe the proposed research design, and develop five hypotheses for later testing. Our work aims at contributing to the research streams on IT business value and business analytics by helping to better understand the nature of the interdependencies between IMC adoption and firm performance.

Organizational culture represents a key success factor in highly competitive environments, such as, the IT sector. Thus, IT companies need to understand what makes up a culture that fosters employee performance. While existing research typically uses self-report questionnaires to study the relation of culture and the success of companies, the validity of this approach is often discussed and researchers call for new ways of studying culture. Therefore, our research goal is to present an alternative ap-proach to culture analysis for examining which cultural factors matter to the IT workforce. Our study builds on 112,610 online reviews of Fortune 500 IT companies collected from Glassdoor, an online platform on which current and former employees can anonymously review companies and their man-agement. We perform an automated content analysis to identify cultural factors that employees em-phasize in their reviews. Through a regression analysis on numerical employee satisfaction ratings, we find that a culture of learning and performance orientation contributes to employee motivation, while a culture of assertiveness and gender inegalitarianism has a strong negative influence on em-ployees’ satisfaction in the IT workforce. Future research can apply our approach as an alternative method to quantifying culture and its impact on other variables.

Business operations are becoming more and more integrated with the real-time intelligence. Core business activities are being carried out through OLTP systems that provide limited monitoring capabilities of the running process instances. The article shows how to turn the gap between the classic transactional system and the process-centric approach into an organization that provides more accurate and faster decisions on the strategic and operational management levels. This study aims at determination of what kind of information can be retrieved during the process execution and it tries to identify the need for the real-time process intelligence on the example of the order-to-cash process. Furthermore, we compare two architectural approaches of the real-time process intelligence monitoring system. The proposed frameworks retrieve process data from the ERP system in order to record crucial performance indicators on a real-time basis with the use of the in-memory technology.

Mobile application development is an emerging lucrative and fast growing market. With the steady growth of the number of apps in the repositories the providers will inevitably face the need to fine-grain the existing hierarchy of categories used to organize the apps. In this paper we present a method to bootstrap the categorization process via topic modeling. We apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to the textual descriptions of iTunes apps in order to identify recurrent topics in the collection. We evaluate and discuss the results obtained from training the model on a set of almost 600,000 English-language app descriptions. Our results demonstrate that automated categorization via LDA-based topic modeling is a promising approach, that can help to structure, analyze and manage the content of app repositories. The topics produced complement the original iTunes categories, concretize and extend them by providing insights into the underlying category content.

Event-driven Business Process Management (EdBPM) is based upon exchanging and processing business events. As yet, no commonly adopted event format for communicating business events between distributed event producers and consumers has emerged. This paper is an effort to review the status quo of event formats against the requirements of EdBPM. We particularly discuss BPAF, CBE, and XES as promising candidates and identify prospects for development.

Real-time access to key performance indicators is necessary to ensure timeliness and effectiveness of operational business processes. The concept of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) refers to the observation, analysis, and presentation of real-time information about business activities across systems' and companies' borders. Designing and maintaining BAM applications is challenging, as the involved concepts (e.g., business processes, audit logs, performance measures) --though being strongly interrelated-- are developed by different communities of practice. Also, they reside on different levels of abstraction, and are handled by different IT systems. Hence, we developed a conceptual modeling language which extends the widely accepted Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) by BAM-relevant concepts. The main results presented in this paper are: (1) a meta-model which formally describes the conceptual aspects of the developed BPMN extension (abstract syntax); (2) graphical symbols as an exemplary representation of this abstract syntax (concrete syntax); (3) a demo scenario that illustrates the application of the language in a fictitious scenario.