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Background African American adolescent females are disproportionately affected by sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV. Given the elevated risk of STIs and HIV in African American women, there is an urgent need to identify innovative strategies to enhance the adoption and maintenance of STI and HIV preventive behaviors. Texting is a promising technology for creating preventive maintenance interventions (PMIs) that extend the efficacy of the original intervention. However, little guidance in public health literature is available for developing this type of application. Objective This paper describes a formative pilot study that incorporates user experience methods to design and test PMI texts for Afiya, an original evidence-based intervention (EBI) specifically designed for African American adolescent females. This study aims to describe the adaptation process of health educator–led phone calling to text-based communication. Methods The formative process followed the assessment, decision, adaptation, production, topical experts-integration, training, testing (ADAPT-ITT) framework for adapting EBIs and using them in a new setting, for a new target population or a modified intervention strategy. This study presents the details of how the phases of the ADAPT-ITT framework were applied to the design of the adaptation. An advisory board was constituted from the target population, consisting of 6 African American women aged 18-24 years, participating in formative activities for 12 weeks, and involving components of the PMI design. As Afiya included a telephone-based PMI, developers of the original Afiya phone scripts crafted the initial design of the SMS-based texts and texting protocol. The advisory board participated in the 1-day Afiya workshop, followed by 4 weeks of texting PMI messages and a midcourse focus group, followed by 4 more weeks of texting PMI messages, ultimately ending with a final focus group. At the advisory board’s request, this phase included an optional, additional week of text-based PMI messages. Results The methods provided a rich source of data and insights into the fundamental issues involved when constructing SMS-based PMI for this target population and for this EBI. Prior contact and context are essential as the health educator was identified as a key persona in the process and the messages were situated in the original (workshop) context. Narrative adaptations for personas emerged from advisory board discussions. Suggestions on how to expand the PMI to current, specific social contexts indicated that the use of narrative analysis is warranted. Conclusions The use of existing EBIs incorporating telephone-based PMI scripts facilitated the initial design of the texts, with a subsequent narrative analysis of the advisory board data providing additional adjustments given the actual context. Additional examination of the advisory board feedback revealed that personas would offer insight into and opportunities for a persona-specific modification of texting narratives.

Strategic decisions can be hard, and when facing hard problems, decision-makers commonly seek others’ advice. But finding a good advisor is tricky: People are biased judges of skill, even more so i...

Since Hurricane Katrina, a lot of research has gone into improving disaster management through the use of crisis information management systems (CIMS). There has been much interest in how to design dynamic CIMS, particularly with respect to web-based emergency management systems. In the authors' research, they set out to design and develop a distributed web-based training and research tool for emergency managers and scholars. In order to develop their training system, they needed to simulate the CIMS that emergency managers use during a crisis and with which they could run training and research simulations. This raised the question: What exactly is a CIMS, and how does one design one? In order to answer this question, the authors engaged in nine months of field research at the Miami-Dade Emergency Operations Center in Miami-Dade County, FL. Through their field research and the emergency management experience of one of the authors, they identified several additional design principles for CIMS in today's technological and communication landscape. This paper outlines the resulting recommendations.

Training is an integral part of disaster preparedness. Practice in dealing with crises improves one's ability to manage emergency situations. As an emergency escalates, more and more agencies get involved. These agencies require training to learn how to manage the crisis and to work together across jurisdictional boundaries. Consequently, training requires participation from many individuals, consumes a great deal of resources in vendor cost for support and staff time, and cannot be conducted often. Moreover, in the current crisis management environment, most training is conducted through discussion-based tabletop and paper-based scenario performance exercises. In this paper, the authors describe a socio-technical training simulator and research tool for upper level emergency managers. This tool is important because it enables emergency managers to train for crises more efficiently and effectively in a virtual environment. It also serves as a research tool for scientists to study emergency management decision-making, infrastructural design, and organizational learning.

This paper examines reuse patterns in transparent multi-staged contests, in which a crowd of developers can reuse others’ designs when developing a novel digital application. They compete for the best application, one that is of high quality in both code and feature. Transparency, defined as collective information access to (1) the design solution, and (2) and the quality of it, triggers variability in reuse choices. Depending on the relative performance, developers adapt their risk preference along a continuum of exploitative to explorative reuse. However, variability in reuse behavior is also shaped by an individuals’ design preference: to focus on either code or feature. To explore patterns of reuse and performance emerging from this micro-level heterogeneity, we develop an agent-based simulation model, informed by theory of reuse and variable risk preferences, as well as emerging empirical data. Our results reveal unexpected discontinuous performance patterns. Design preferences, a bias towards code or feature, lowers the collective performance of the crowd. However, transparency insulates those at the top from such negative effects. It produces high performing designs even if there is bias. Further, while transparency reduces variability and smooths the patterns among those at the top, it also creates unique opportunities for ‘newcomers’ to submit high-quality applications.

The principles of open collaboration for innovation (and production), once distinctive to open source software, are now found in many other ventures. Some of these ventures are Internet based: for example, Wikipedia and online communities. Others are off-line: they are found in medicine, science, and everyday life. Such ventures have been affecting traditional firms and may represent a new organizational form. Despite the impact of such ventures, their operating principles and performance are not well understood. Here we define open collaboration (OC), the underlying set of principles, and propose that it is a robust engine for innovation and production. First, we review multiple OC ventures and identify four defining principles. In all instances, participants create goods and services of economic value, they exchange and reuse each other’s work, they labor purposefully with just loose coordination, and they permit anyone to contribute and consume. These principles distinguish OC from other organizational forms, such as firms or cooperatives. Next, we turn to performance. To understand the performance of OC, we develop a computational model, combining innovation theory with recent evidence on human cooperation. We identify and investigate three elements that affect performance: the cooperativeness of participants, the diversity of their needs, and the degree to which the goods are rival (subtractable). Through computational experiments, we find that OC performs well even in seemingly harsh environments: when cooperators are a minority, free riders are present, diversity is lacking, or goods are rival. We conclude that OC is viable and likely to expand into new domains. The findings also inform the discussion on new organizational forms, collaborative and communal.

Strategic decisions can be hard, and when facing hard problems, individuals commonly seek others’ advice. But what makes a problem hard – incomplete data, ambiguous outcomes, foggy causality – can ...

When does knowledge transfer benefit performance? Combining field data from a global consulting firm with an agent-based model, we examine how efforts to supplement one's knowledge from coworkers interact with individual, organizational, and environmental characteristics to impact organizational performance. We find that once cost and interpersonal exchange are included in the analysis, the impact of knowledge transfer is highly contingent. Depending on specific characteristics and circumstances, knowledge transfer can better, matter little to, or even harm performance. Three illustrative studies clarify puzzling past results and offer specific boundary conditions: (1) At the individual level, better organizational support for employee learning diminishes the benefit of knowledge transfer for organizational performance. (2) At the organization level, broader access to organizational memory makes global knowledge transfer less beneficial to performance. (3) When the organizational environment becomes more turbulent, the organizational performance benefits of knowledge transfer decrease. The findings imply that organizations may forgo investments in both organizational memory and knowledge exchange, that wide-ranging knowledge exchange may be unimportant or even harmful for performance, and that organizations operating in turbulent environments may find that investment in knowledge exchange undermines performance rather than enhances it. At a time when practitioners are urged to make investments in facilitating knowledge transfer and collaboration, appreciation of the complex relationship between knowledge transfer and performance will help in reaping benefits while avoiding liabilities.

A key component of negotiation dynamics is the search for mutually beneficial agreements, and offer exchange is a key element of that process. Rooted in the tradition of information processing psychology, we develop a theoretical model that conceives of negotiation as the collaborative search of a complex offer space. Negotiators simplify and coordinate search via information contained in offer exchanges, isolating subregions of the offer space for potential solutions. We suggest that early search is more exploratory and primarily influenced by the value of offers; later search is more focused on refinement and is influenced by the content of offers. In that, search by value is substantially more difficult than search by content, and parties seek value through communicating about content. Important information about the negotiators’ perspectives is revealed in comprehensive offers, and critical insight into this search process can be gained by examining the pattern of comprehensive offers.

In this paper we replicate and extend the work of the Computers are Social Actors (CASA) researchers who repeatedly found evidence that humans treat computers with typical social norms as if they were humans. We performed a between-subjects 2x2 factorial experiment to test our hypotheses as well as an exploratory factor analysis to further refine and validate a construct which measures politeness. We retest the CASA hypothesis and found that our new hypothesis - Websites are Social Actors (WASA) reduces the CASA effect in contexts where individuals form a social attachment to websites instead of computers. We found evidence that suggests humans can exhibit politeness toward websites and literally (not virtually) treat them as social actors. Finally, we tease out the elements of politeness as a construct and identify the key items in the instrument for data reduction, and initiate efforts towards establishing reliability and construct validity. As we shall see, the results of an exploratory factor analysis are quite consistent to recent research in social cognition, and suggest that the politeness construct may be tapping similar and fundamental components of how humans engage with others in their social world.

Since 2001, many state and local health departments have implemented automated systems to monitor healthcare use and to promptly identify and track epidemics and other public health threats. In 2007-08, we conducted case studies of selected events with actual or potential public health impacts to determine whether and how health departments and hospitals used these new systems. We interviewed public health and hospital representatives and applied qualitative analysis methods to identify response themes. So-called "syndromic" surveillance methods were most useful in situations with widespread health effects, such as respiratory illness associated with seasonal influenza or exposures to smoke from wildfires. In other instances, such as a tornado or hazardous material exposures, these systems were useful for detecting or monitoring health impacts that affected relatively few people, or they were used to affirm the absence of outbreaks following natural disasters or the detection of a potential pathogen in air samples. Typically, these data supplemented information from traditional sources to provide a timelier or fuller mosaic of community health status, and use was shaped by long-standing contacts between health department and hospital staffs. State or local epidemiologists generally preferred syndromic systems they had developed over the CDC BioSense system, citing lesser familiarity with BioSense and less engagement in its development. Instances when BioSense data were most useful to state officials occurred when analyses and reports were provided by CDC staff. Understanding the uses of surveillance information during such events can inform further investments in surveillance capacity in public health emergency preparedness programs.

Richard Cyert and James March’s (1963) A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (ABTOF) is one of the most influential works in organization science. An important element of that work was a computational model of a duopoly, which was arguably the first computational model that instantiated organizational constructs within a substantial theoretical framework. We suggest that the academic environment within which this theory and model grew was instrumental in its emergence. Furthermore, an examination of the model itself (by triangulating on the verbal descriptions, the flow charts, and the code) reveals innovative embodiments of organizational attention, organizational learning, organizational memory, routines, metaroutines, aspiration level adjustments and computational experiments. In this paper we examine the historical roots of the model—the concepts, culture, and characters at Carnegie Tech and the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA). Although causality is difficult to assess historically, we suggest the significance of a strong research-based, interdisciplinary culture at a time when innovative (and often computational) concepts and theories were emerging within the contexts of computer science, economics, and psychology.

It is often presumed that knowledge exchange (or transfer) leads to distinctive advantages for firms. Amalgamating extensive qualitative data from knowledge-intensive sites and agent-based simulati...

A Behavioral Theory of the Firm by James March and Richard Cyert is one of the most influential works in organizational science. An interesting and important element of that work was a computational model of a duopoly, which was eliminated in the second edition of the book. We examine the structure of the model and illustrate how the theoretical constructs were implemented: organizational attention, organizational learning, organizational memory, routines and meta-routines, and computational experiments. We also explore the academic environment within which this theory and model grew. We suggest that an interesting question is why the theory had a distinctly greater impact than the method on organizational research and education.

This paper examines reuse patterns in transparent multi-staged contests, in which a crowd of developers can reuse others’ designs when developing a novel digital application. They compete for the b...

We present a process theory describing how strategists form and stabilize mental models of causal relationships for the class of strategy problems that involve dynamic decision-making (DDM). Most o...

Contents: R.M. Cyert, Foreword. K.M. Carley, M.J. Prietula, Introduction: Computational Organization Theory. R.E. Levitt, G.P. Cohen, J.C. Kunz, C.I. Nass, T. Christiansen, Y. Jin, The "Virtual Design Team": Simulating How Organization Structure and Information Processing Tools Affect Team Performance. K. Crowston, Evolving Novel Organizational Forms. H. Verhagen, M. Masuch, TASCCS: A Synthesis of Double-AISS and Plural-Soar. K.M. Carley, M.J. Prietula, ACTS Theory: Extending the Model of Bounded Rationality. D. Krackhardt, Graph Theoretical Dimensions of Informal Organizations. Z. Lin, A Theoretical Evaluation of Measures of Organizational Design: Interrelationship and Performance Predictability. M. Verkama, R.P. Hamalainen, H. Ehtamo, Modeling and Computational Analysis of Reactive Behavior in Organizations. H.H. Baligh, R.M. Burton, B. Obel, Validating an Expert System That Designs Organizations. T.K. Lant, Computer Simulations of Organizations as Experiential Learning Systems: Implications for Organization Theory. N.S. Glance, B.A. Huberman, Social Dilemmas and Fluid Organizations. D.K. Gode, S. Sunder, Human and Artificially Intelligent Traders in Computer Double Auctions. P. Shi, P.B. Luh, D.L. Kleinman, Team Coordination Under Individual and Team Goals. G.E.G. Beroggi, W.A. Wallace, A Decision Logic for Operational Risk Management.

Our personal values are subject to forces of social influence. Deontological resolve captures how strongly one relies on absolute rules of right and wrong in the representation of one's personal values and may predict willingness to modify one's values in the presence of social influence. Using fMRI, we found that a neurobiological metric for deontological resolve based on relative activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) during the passive processing of sacred values predicted individual differences in conformity. Individuals with stronger deontological resolve, as measured by greater VLPFC activity, displayed lower levels of conformity. We also tested whether responsiveness to social reward, as measured by ventral striatal activity during social feedback, predicted variability in conformist behavior across individuals but found no significant relationship. From these results we conclude that unwillingness to conform to others' values is associated with a strong neurobiological representation of social rules.

The impact of tactical knowledge on integrative and distributive response-in-kind behavior sequences and the ability to shift from distributive to integrative behaviors were examined using data from a prior study. Ninety dyads engaged in a multi-issue joint venture negotiation. Forty-five dyads were provided tactical knowledge and the other 45 were not. Markov chain analysis was used to test the hypotheses. A second-order chain best fit the data. Results showed that negotiators responded-in-kind to both distributive and integrative tactical behavior regardless of tactical knowledge. In line with Weick's (1969) “double interact” proposition of interlocked behaviors, negotiators with tactical knowledge were more likely to respond-in-kind to integrative behavior than were those without such knowledge, but only after their previous integrative behavior had been reciprocated. In addition, negotiators with tactical knowledge engaged in longer chains of integrative behavior (regardless of the behavior of the other party) than did negotiators without tactical knowledge; however, this only occurred after two integrative behaviors had occurred previously.

We sought to determine whether reading a novel causes measurable changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain and how long these changes persist. Incorporating a within-subjects design, participants received resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on 19 consecutive days. First, baseline resting state data for a “washin” period were taken for each participant for 5 days. For the next 9 days, participants read 1/9th of a novel during the evening and resting-state data were taken the next morning. Finally, resting-state data for a “wash-out” period were taken for 5 days after the conclusion of the novel. On the days after the reading, significant increases in connectivity were centered on hubs in the left angular/supramarginal gyri and right posterior temporal gyri. These hubs corresponded to regions previously associated with perspective taking and story comprehension, and the changes exhibited a timecourse that decayed rapidly after the completion of the novel. Long-term changes in connectivity, which persisted for several days after the reading, were observed in bilateral somatosensory cortex, suggesting a potential mechanism for “embodied semantics.”

Strategic decisions can be uncertain and intractable, so decision-makers commonly seek advice from peers. Yet finding a skilled advisor is tricky: People are poor judges of skill, even more so in the wicked environments where many strategic decisions happen. Starting from micro-level empirical data, we craft a theoretical model of strategic advice-taking and its consequences. We show that if decision-makers were perfect judges of skill, then advice-taking is always beneficial. But under experimentally validated assumptions of skill misjudgment, peer advice benefits the less-skilled while harms highly skilled decision-makers. As this bifurcation propagates through an organization, it degrades skill and harms performance. Turning to solutions, we propose when limiting advice-taking is beneficial for individuals and organizations.