Publications

Words to use with care? CEO dispositional optimism vs overconfidence”

Published in Finance Research Letters, 2024

CEO overconfidence and dispositional optimism are often used interchangeably. This paper addresses two key issues that result in this problem, (1) the conflation and confounding between CEO overconfidence and dispositional optimism; (2) the lack of consideration for the other parties’ individual traits. To expose the theoretical and empirical distinctions, we examine the interaction between supplier and customer, and its effects on supplier’s relationship-specific investments. Theory indicates that both traits show a proclivity to overinvestments, but interestingly, results differ when accounting by the other parties’ optimism and overconfidence. Specifically, the customer CEOs optimism strengthens this relationship while overconfidence weakens it.

Recommended citation: Grove, S., Nelson, A., Villacis-Calderon, E. D., & Dow, K. E. (2024). Words to use with care? CEO dispositional optimism vs overconfidence. Finance Research Letters, 59, 104785. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2023.104785

How Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm shapes childhood vaccine hesitancy: An algorithmic fairness, accountability, and transparency (FAT) perspective

Published in Data and Information Management, 2023

Vaccine hesitancy is the delay or refusal of vaccination when vaccines are available. Over the last decade, many reports have suggested that the proliferation of vaccine disinformation and misinformation on social media has aggravated the vaccine-hesitancy problem. Access to vaccine dis(mis)information on social media is deemed partly responsible for the resurfacing of vaccine-preventable diseases (e.g., measles). Although studies have examined social media dis(mis)information, including that related to vaccines, the newsfeed algorithm, which determines the content social media users see, has received scant attention in the literature. We examine how people’s perceptions of the fairness, accountability, and transparency (FAT) of the Facebook newsfeed algorithm influence their intention to vaccinate their children. We find that people’s perceptions of the Facebook newsfeed algorithm’s FAT increase their…

Recommended citation: Villacis-Calderon, E. D., James, T. L., & Lowry, P. B. (2023). How Facebook's newsfeed algorithm shapes childhood vaccine hesitancy: An algorithmic fairness, accountability, and transparency (FAT) perspective. Data and Information Management, 7(3), 100042. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dim.2023.100042

The moderating effect of technology overload on the ability of online learning to meet students’ basic psychological needs

Published in Information & Management, 2022

We extend a theoretical framework for telecommuting to examine online learning. Additionally, we consider the role of technology overload and experience both as drivers and as moderators of students’ BPNs satisfaction and frustration in online learning. Our results provide valuable insights that can inform efforts to rebalance the deployment of ICTs to facilitate online educational experiences.

Recommended citation: James, T. L., Villacis-Calderon, E. D., Bélanger, F., & Lowry, P. B. (2022). The mediating role of group dynamics in shaping received social support from active and passive use in online health communities. Information & Management, 59(3), 103606. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2022.103606

The mediating role of group dynamics in shaping received social support from active and passive use in online health communities

Published in Information Technology & People, 2022

Exchanging social support on online health communities (OHCs) can be beneficial to people’s health, but the OHC characteristics that promote environments in which users feel socially supported are understudied. We develop a model that examines the mediating influence of OHC cohesiveness, altruism, and universality on the relationships between active and passive use and received OHC social support. Our findings indicate that social support can be derived from both active and passive use of the OHC. Although active use can directly stimulate received OHC social support, the relationship between passive use and social support is fully mediated by OHC group dynamics.

Recommended citation: James, T.L., Zhang, J., Li, H., Ziegelmayer, J.L. and Villacis-Calderon, E.D. (2021), The moderating effect of technology overload on the ability of online learning to meet students' basic psychological needs, Information Technology & People , Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead- of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-03-2021-0225

Exploring patient perceptions of healthcare service quality through analysis of unstructured feedback

Published in Expert Systems With Applications, 2017

Mechanisms for collecting unstructured feedback (i.e., text comments) from patients of healthcare providers have become commonplace, but analysis techniques to examine such feedback have not been frequently applied in this domain. To fill this gap, we apply a text mining methodology to a large set of textual feedback of physicians by their patients and relate the textual commentary to their numeric ratings. While perceptions of healthcare service quality in the form of numeric ratings are easy to aggregate, freeform textual commentary presents more challenges to extracting useful information. Our methodology explores aggregation of the textual commentary using a topic analysis procedure (i.e., latent Dirichlet allocation) and a sentiment tool (i.e., Diction). We then explore how the extracted topic areas and expressed sentiments relate to the physicians’ quantitative ratings of service quality from both patients and other physicians. We analyze 23,537 numeric ratings plus textual feedback provided by patients of 3,712 physicians who have also been recommended by other physicians, and determine process quality satisfaction is an important driver of patient perceived quality, whereas clinical quality better reflects physician perceived quality. Our findings lead us to suggest that to maximize the usefulness of online reviews of physicians, potential patients should parse them for particular quality elements they wish to assess and interpret them within the scope of those quality elements.

Recommended citation: James, T.L., Villacis Calderon, E., and Cook, D.F. (2017). "Exploring Patient Perceptions of Healthcare Service Quality through Analysis of Unstructured Feedback", Expert Systems with Applications , 17, 479-492. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2016.11.004