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This paper examines the relationships between student interest, self-efficacy, and perceptions of the instructor on a set of learning outcomes that include, but are broader than, traditiona...

Many business schools are criticized for being ineffective in helping students learn proper management skills and knowledge. Flow theory has been cited as being helpful in many learning environment...

Information consumption in China occurs in a rapidly shifting social and political environment. Understanding this group of information consumers is likely to play an important role in business and political decision making globally for the foreseeable future. Ratings of the importance of the dimensions of information quality and the way in which these ratings have shifted over time shed light on the beliefs of this group of information consumers. This study reports the results of a nonpanel longitudinal study involving two surveys conducted in China over a five year period examining information consumer ratings of the importance of the dimensions of information quality. Results show that Chinese information consumers rate the information quality dimensions of believability, reputation, and value-added as less important at the end of the five year period than at the beginning and rate representational consistency and concise representation as more important at the end of the five year period than at the beginning.

The International Rube Goldberg Machine Competition (Rube Goldberg, 2015) provides the foundation for a class project in an undergraduate business school course designed to teach principles of project management and leadership skills. The project provides a challenging, ill-structured task that allows students to apply project management and leadership theory and develop their skills. The article reports the results of a survey suggesting that students viewed the project positively and that student knowledge of project management and leadership skills improved as a result of completing the project.

The authors investigated the effects of flow on learning outcomes in a graduate-level operations management course. Flow was assessed through an overall flow score, four dimensions of flow, and three characteristics of flow activities. Learning outcomes were measured objectively through multiple-choice quiz scores and subjectively using measures of students’ perceived learning of the subject matter, students’ perceived skill development, and student satisfaction. The findings show that flow affected students’ perceived learning of the subject matter and student satisfaction but did not affect learning performance as measured through multiple-choice quizzes. Partial support is found for an effect of flow on students’ perceived skill development.

Organizational databases have a significant rate of data errors and detecting and correcting these errors can be problematic. This paper builds on a stream of research demonstrating that users of these databases can detect data errors under certain circumstances. A theory of error detection and research on the effect of base rate expectations in probabilistic judgement tasks are applied to the development of two propositions about error detection. It is argued that expectations about the base rate of errors in data affect error detection performance when they are developed through direct experience and that incentives affect error detection performance. The two research propositions are tested in a laboratory experiment. Experience-based expectations about the base rate of errors and incentives are found to affect error detection performance.

User evaluations of information systems are frequently used as measures of MIS success, since it is extremely difficult to get objective measures of system performance. However, user evaluations have been appropriately criticized as lacking a clearly articulated theoretical basis for linking them to systems effectiveness, and almost no research has been found that explicitly tests the link between user evaluations of systems and objectively measured performance. In this paper, we focus on user evaluations of task-technology fit for mandatory use systems and develop theoretical arguments for the link to individual performance. This is then empirically tested in a controlled experiment with objective performance measures and carefully validated user evaluations. Statistically significant support for the link is found for one measure of performance but not for a second. These findings are consistent with others which found that users are not necessarily accurate reporters of key constructs related to use of IS, specifically that self reporting is a poor measure of actual utilization. The possibility that user evaluations have a stronger link to performance when users receive feedback on their performance is proposed. Implications are discussed.

Neural networks have been applied in a wide variety of business domains. Although databases used in many organizations have been found to contain errors, little is known about the effect of these errors on predictions made by neural network models. The article uses a real-world example, the prediction of the net asset values of mutual funds, to investigate the effect of data quality on neural network models. The results of two experiments are reported. The first experiment shows that the error rate (ranging from 25 to 100%) and magnitude of error (5 and 10%) in data used in model prediction affect the predictive accuracy of neural networks. The second experiment shows that the error rate (ranging from 5 to 20%) and the magnitude of error (5 and 10%) in data used to build the model affect the predictive accuracy of neural networks. The findings have managerial implications for users and builders of neural networks working with databases containing errors.

The most frequent application of the quadratic assignment problem has been in facility layout, which is concerned with locating the activities or departments of an organization in a fixed set of locations such that those activities with the strongest interrelationships are closest to each other. Early attempts to explain the varying performance of optimal and heuristic solution procedures on different layout problems focused on a univariate complexity measure such as the coefficient of variation. Recently, a multivariate measure for assessing the complexity of the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) formulation of the facility layout problem has been proposed. This paper introduces a new thresholding procedure for capturing critical relationship information, expands the eight components of the multivariate complexity measure by adding two new components, demonstrates a new solution value bound and experimentally determines the effect on solution quality of using either one of two heuristic solution procedures versus an optimal procedure. This result is important because it enables layout planners to determine in advance the likelihood of obtaining an optimal solution. It also tells them which problem characteristics are important and their relative weights in determining the solution outcome.

Information systems provide data for business processes and decision making. There is strong evidence that data items stored in organizational databases have a significant rate of errors. If undetected in use, errors in data may significantly affect business outcomes. The question examined in this paper is the extent to which business professionals are able to evaluate the quality of data in the information systems they use and the impact of their evaluations on decision-making behavior. Models of error detection and error correction processes are developed. The validity of the models is then examined through an analysis of interviews with ten actuaries. The findings show that actuaries detect errors in data using three general methods and that actuaries consider feasibility and costs when deciding whether to correct data errors.

Data stored in organizational databases have a significant error rate. As computerized databases continue to proliferate, the number of errors in stored data and the organizational impact of these errors are likely to increase. The impact of data errors on business processes and decision making can be lessened if users of information systems are able and willing to detect and correct data errors. However, some published research suggests that users of information systems do not detect data errors. This paper reports the results of a study showing that municipal bond analysts detect data errors. The results provide insight into the conditions under which users in organizational settings detect data errors. Guidelines for improving error detection are also discussed.

More than a half billion people use the internet in China, and the environment in which these users work, study, and play using the internet is a rapidly changing one. User perceptions of the quality of information accessed through the internet and through more traditional sources of information may shift over time as the underlying social, cultural, and political environment changes. This study reports the results of a longitudinal survey study of perceptions of information quality of young adults using the internet in China. Results suggest that perceptions of the information quality of internet-based information have shifted more from 2007 to 2012 than perceptions of traditional text sources of information. Implications of the findings for researchers, educators, and information providers are discussed.

Despite the recent explosive growth in internet usage in China, little research has addressed perceptions of the internet held by Chinese users. The results of a survey study of Chinese users' perceptions of the information quality of internet and traditional text sources of information are reported. Results show significant differences in perceptions of the internet and traditional text sources of information. Chinese users perceive the believability, accuracy, objectivity, reputation, interpretability, representational consistency, concise reputation, and access security of traditional text sources of information such as books, magazine, journals, and newspapers to be higher than that of internet sources and the completeness, appropriate amount, and accessibility of internet sources to be higher than traditional text sources of information.

This study examines perceptions of information quality held by information technology professionals and examines the question of whether perceptions of information quality dimensions held by information technology professionals are the same as those held by data consumers. The dimensions of information quality rated most important by the information technology professionals are accuracy, timeliness, ease of understanding, and accessibility. The data consumers' ratings of relevancy are higher than those of the information technology professionals, and the information technology professionals' ratings of concise representation are higher than those of the data consumers.