Letter from Beijing and the International Conference on E-Business

MISRC Director Presents Keynote Speech in Beijing, China

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I was fortunate this month to have the opportunity to give the keynote speech in the 2004 International Conference on E-Business, in Beijing , China on Monday, December 6, 2004. This year, I have been to China a couple times, and the rapid pace of economic growth and the extraordinary interest I see in information technology and technology-based products gives me the same feelings I had in 1998 and 1999, as the expansion of e-commerce and the related emerging technologies took hold in the United States . It's exhilarating to visit this place and see all of the new development--and have time to practice my Chinese.

My Beijing speech, entitled "Massive Quasi-Experimental Methods and the Discovery of E-Business Knowledge," tells the story of the innovations my research colleagues and I at the Carlson School of Management have made since 1998, in the use of software agent technologies for acquiring massive amounts of data from the Internet. We have developed a range of new automated, agent-based data collection techniques during the past five years to study a variety of interesting topics: strategic price leading and following behaviors on the part of Internet firms; the inner workings of bidding behavior in group buying websites; weekend and picture-based effects on final bid prices in electronic auctions; and Internet-based markets for fixed income securities. Our focus in the past couple years has been on the study of price rigidity and price changes in e-commerce. This work has been developed in collaboration with Professor of Marketing, Mark Bergen, and IDSc doctoral student, Dongwon Lee, who is doing his doctoral thesis in this area.

In my speech, I provided the conference audience with a new vision of massive quasi-experimental research. This is a methodology that I have been exploring together with research colleagues in the Carlson School and elsewhere, as a means to structure the process of discovering knowledge about e-commerce and e-business operations. I gave the audience some ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of collecting data via the Internet in terms of traditional evaluative dimensions for research methods including considerations like data collection power, obtrusiveness, tendency to bias data, collection cost, data completeness and quality, reliability, ability to replicate and other dimensions. I illustrated this perspective with recent research on "9" price-endings, and other pricing patterns that are observed in Internet-based selling, based on the research with Dongwon and Mark. I also provided an overview of other research that has been completed to show the application of the evaluative framework that I advocated for understanding where the opportunities to make new research contributions lie.

I look forward to returning to this place and spending more time with my new friends at Qing Hua University in Beijing, where there are a number of research efforts underway that reflect a similar approach to the study of e-business and Internet auction research. I also want to take this opportunity to personally thank Professor Jian Chen, who was a most welcoming and charming host. We look forward to having him and his students visit the MIS Research Center and the Carlson School of Management, when time and circumstances permit.

Robert J. Kauffman
Director, MIS Research Center
Professor and Chair, Department of Information and Decision Sciences

[ View pdf of keynote presentation ] (10,235 kb)
[ View pdf of keynote paper ] (206 kb)