When interests collide: Understanding and modeling interests alignment using fair pricing in the context of interorganizational information systems Defended on Friday, 5 June 2020

Over the decades, companies have been working on making communications with their partners faster, cheaper, and more reliable. Today, every organization uses at least some type of an interorganizational information system (IOS) in its routine operations, whether for communication with their business partners or with authorities. One of the unifying characteristics of all IOSs is that they bring value to their adopter only if other companies have also adopted the system; this adoption depends on how well the interests of different companies have been integrated into the IOS design.

This dissertation investigates the variety of interests that companies pursue when developing an IOS and how fair sharing can facilitate the alignment of those interests. We propose a new pricing strategy that relies on two building blocks: user value-based pricing and fair sharing. We demonstrate that a fair sharing scheme can create additional incentives for co-opetition, simultaneous competition, and cooperation, among IOS adopting competitors and that network structure plays an important role in IOS adoption in this case. We also demonstrate how different companies’ interests affect the development of IOSs at the business community level. To describe the process, we introduce a new concept: the landscape of interorganizational information systems.

Overall, this research contributes to the IOS literature by stressing the importance of interests’ alignment when developing IOSs for maximizing business community gains from IOS adoption. We provide a detailed investigation into how the pricing mechanism based on fair sharing can serve as an instrument for achieving such an alignment.

Keywords

Interorganizational information system, IOS, business community system, port community system, EDI, information infrastructure, seaport, pricing strategy, fair sharing, Shapley value