Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

4848

Son Ngoc Bui

Date

2016

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Business Admin

Major

Business Information & Tech

Concentration

Business Information & Tech

Committee Member

Euntae Ted Lee

Committee Member

Naveen Kumar

Abstract

In dynamic markets, companies constantly look for new ways to attract more customers, accelerate innovation, and improve their products. This two-way dissertation examines different information technology (IT) strategies used by firms to compete.The first essay investigates the impact of customers' willingness to share identity information on their repurchase intention whem companies use online adaptive personalization systems. The secondessays empirically open source software (OSS) startups' success and proprietary closed-source software startups' success and examines how the top management team's business knowledge moderates the impact of software production strategy on startups' success. Adaptive personalization systems are becoming common in online retail. These systems use dynamically generated data and advanced data analytic techniques such as content filtering and clickstream analysis to infer customer preferences and recommend products or services best suited to a customers' tastes. However, the ability of the adaptive personalization system to continue deliver valuable personalize content relies heavily on the return customers' willingness to continue to share his/her identity information. In the first essay, by applying identity control theory and the action-cognitive processing-decision model, we theorize the cognitive and behavioral process whereby customers who willingly share identity information assess the value of product or service recommendations provided by adaptive personalization systems relative to their self-identity needs. We next examines the effect of willingness to share identity information and perceived personalization value on repurchase intention. The research results empirically demonstrate a mediating effect of perceived adaptive personalizationvalue between willingness to share identity informationand repurchase intention. The study's findings point to the importance of customers' willingness to share identity information and seeing value in recommended products or services that align with their identity needs in driving repurchase intention. The OSS development strategy has fundamentally transformed software development practices. Still up to debate is whether software startups using an OSS development approach have a better chance to succeed than those that use a proprietary closed-source software development approach. On one hand, OSS allows a software startup to leverage external resources from the open source community to facilitate its innovation, but external individuals' inputs and participation pose greater business risk and require greater business acumen to effectively manage the needed external knowledge and outside resources. On the other hand, closed-source software development approach allows the software startup to implement more effective "lock-in" strategies with customers. However, the closed-source approach requires intensive investment in acquiring software talent to support the development and maintenance of the firm's proprietary software products. Literature also suggests that a startups' top management team's business knowledge is a key factor orchestrating a startups' performance. Strong business knowledge is particularly needed by firms following an open source development approach, as their managers must leverage the knowledge value of the open source community while minimizing information leakage of their own firm's intellectual property. In the second essay, we empirically test our hypotheses by analyzing software startups' archival data collected from multiple sources. Usingthe Cox proportional hazard model to analyze the longitudinal data collected in the period of 2001-2016, we find that startups that used the proprietary development strategy are more likely to succeed (as measured by participation in IPOs andacquisitions) than startups that used an OSS development strategy.Furthermore, when the top management team of the startup has a greater amount of business knowledge, the risk involved in adopting the OSS development strategy is mitigated. This study contributes to the OSS literature as well as the IT entrepreneurship literature by theorizing and testing the joint effects of software production strategy and the entrepreneurs' business knowledge on software startups' success. Practically, our findings provide insights to software entrepreneurs on the key factors that may influence their software startups' success.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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