Internet and the Digital Economy

The Internet and Digital Economy (I&DE) track focuses on the ways in which the Internet affects people, groups, organizations, and societies (e.g., markets, social networks), as well as fundamental issues in the development and operation of the Internet and Internet applications (e.g., security, open source, and cloud).

Like many other tracks at HICSS, I&DE has a long history, dating to 1997 when it became a standalone minitrack. Over the years there have been over 80 different minitracks held and more than 1600 research papers delivered. Among the variety of minitracks some of the key mainstays have included: Crowd- Based Platforms, Crowdsourcing and Digital Workforce, Electronic Marketing, Human-Computer Interaction, Behavioral Security and Privacy, Social Shopping, Digital Supply Chain, and the Internet of Everything.

This year the track includes 26 minitracks. Across these minitracks, we received 237 submissions, accepting 116, resulting in a 49 percent acceptance rate. This year’s minitracks are described below:

Actors, Agents, and Avatars: Visualizing Digital Humans in E-Commerce and Social Media. This minitrack focuses on the visualization and application of digital human characters in the context of Ecommerce and social media disciplines. This minitrack is a place for researchers and practitioners from diverse backgrounds to share their research and ideas on a variety of important issues and topics related to digital humans.

Artificial Intelligence-based Assistants. This minitrack is primarily focused on two types of AI-based assistants. First, virtual personal assistants and chatbots, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, enable the interaction of human beings with applications in new ways. Second, AI-based assistants replacing humans interfacing between two or more application systems.

Crowd-Based Platforms. This minitrack examines the design and effects of a variety of crowd-based platforms including crowdsourcing context, online labor, crowdfunding marketplaces and onlinecommunities. Research in this area originates from various methodologies such as econometrics, field or lab experimentation, field surveys, analytic modeling, or grounded theory approaches.

Crowdsourcing and Digital Workforce in the Gig Economy. This minitrack examines theoretical and empirical studies addressing organizational, managerial, technical, and behavioral perspectives on digital work and crowd work. Research that lies at the intersection of multiple disciplines, namely Information Technology, Organization Science, Human Resource Management, and Behavioral Science will inform innovation in digital work and work re-design.

Cybercrime. This minitrack aim is to give insights and develop a theoretical and practical understanding of issues related to cybercrime using any methodological approach, including conceptual, theoretical, empirical and methodological papers that enrich our understanding of illegal online practices.

Data Spaces for Sustainability and Resilience in Manufacturing. This minitrack focuses on exploring current and emerging technologies as well as fostering sustainability and resilience in the next generation of production systems. Data-enriched views on processes and an increasing information capability (in real-time, complete, distributed) are the underlying principles of improving the efficiency of processes and avoiding waste over the complete life cycle of products and industrial assets.

Designing Data Ecosystems: Value, Impacts, and Fundamentals. This minitrack focuses on exploring the fundamentals of data ecosystems from multiple perspectives. Such topics include studies that discover the meaning of data sharing, classification of ecosystems, business value within different domains, the influence of differing technologies, governance mechanisms, and various aspects of sustainability, security, and privacy.

Economic and Societal Impacts of Technology, Data, and Algorithms. This minitrack invites submissions concerning business value, implications, and impacts associated with the development and applications of AI and ML technologies and algorithms. The minitrack also welcomes submissions of research-in-progress as well as those that are practically oriented yet have the potential to make significant contributions to the broad business community.

Electronic Marketing. This minitrack focuses on understanding effective strategies for attracting customers, increasing their purchases, satisfaction and loyalty, as well as the responses and behavior of customers to various online marketing vehicles and consumer generated media.

Enterprise Blockchains. This minitrack deals with fundamental research revolving around the methods and techniques, issues, and key challenges, as well as organizational approaches for understanding the potential of DLTs for business models, value chains, emerging competitive landscapes and new start-ups employing this technology.

Esports. This minitrack aims to provide insight into esports’ theoretical development and practical understanding without excluding any methodological approach or scientific disciplines. Conceptual, theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that enrich our understanding of esports are welcome.

Firm, User, and Machine Generated Content in the Digital Economy: Analytics, Prediction, Recommendation, and Impact. This minitrack considers the communication shift from traditional one-way to two-way communication, with content being used as a means for earning trust with consumers. Papers dealing with the creation, usage, management and impact of content for digital economy are encouraged.

Hospitality and Tourism in a Global Digital Economy: New Models, Services, and Performance. This minitrack focuses on the challenges of digital disruption and transformation in the hospitality and tourism industry. Research taking a socio-technical, organizational, managerial and/ or individual perspective are welcomed and can be conceptual, empirical, and design-oriented contributions using macro, meso and micro levels of analysis

Human-Centricity in a Sustainable Digital Economy. This minitrack aims to attract research that advances the understanding of human-centricity and end-user empowerment in a sustainable digital economy. It adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, which considers human-centricity and end-user empowerment across application domains (e.g. software development, digital commerce, healthcare, administration, mobile apps, social media, and online services).

Human-Computer Interaction in the Digital Economy. This minitrack explores a wide range of topics related to human-computer interaction using a wide spectrum of research methodologies including, but not limited to, behavioral methods, neurophysiological tools, and design science approaches. Accordingly, papers may draw on various reference disciplines to inform design, such as: computer science, information systems, consumer behavior, psychology, organizational sciences, and neuroscience.

Immersive Technologies in Business. This minitrack aims to provide a discussion forum for involved and interested researchers on the adoption, usage, and impact of immersive technologies in business. We invite submissions on AR, VR, MR, as well as other immersive technologies. We encourage both established scholars with ongoing research in the field as well as emerging scholars who are forming new propositions in this exciting domain.

Innovative Behavioral IS Security and Privacy Research. This minitrack provides a venue for innovative research that rigorously addresses the risks to information system security and privacy, focusing on individual behaviors within this nomological net. Domains include work related to detecting, mitigating, and preventing both internal and external human threats to organizational security.

Intelligent Information Access and Retrieval. This minitrack is concerned with the theory, implementation and evaluation of intelligent information access and retrieval models, systems and technologies over the Internet to bust novel application areas and novel contexts, including big data retrieval, community based retrieval, geographic information retrieval, collaborative searching and retrieval, web information access and retrieval.

Internet of Everything. This minitrack addresses issues related to the coming of various emerging smart devices including consumer adoption of wearable and embeddable technologies.

Making Digital Transformation Real. This minitrack explores tools, methods or strategies helping companies to deal with digital transformations through theoretical and applied work. Other focal topics will include metrics and other indicators for measuring the success or degree of digital transformation.

Platform Ecosystems in Production and Logistics: Technologies, Business Models, and Data-Driven Artifacts. This minitrack explores how open-source paradigm facilitates novel business models and applications that enable the construction of shared logistical ecosystems between different stakeholders. Appropriate papers include those that propose technical solutions in Logistics (both intra- and inter logistics) as well as conceptual contributions dealing with novel logistical business models.

Social Commerce: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. This minitrack explores insights and develops theoretical understanding of the topics and issues related to the influence of OSN on consumption orientated shopping decisions.

The Diffusion, Impacts, Adoption and Usage of ICTs upon Society. This minitrack provides a “global” perspective of how ICTs are being diffused, used and adopted within society (households and social communities).

The Digital Supply Chain of the Future: Applications, Implications, Business Models. This minitrack focuses on the rise and impact of the agile supply chain and the concomitant rise in smart products and services.

The Social and Economic Dynamics of the Metaverse, Smart Contracts, and Non-Fungible Tokens. This minitrack is dedicated to the examination of the social and economic effects of the emergence of the Metaverse, Smart Contracts, and NFT’s. These emerging technologies have captured the public’s attention and are beginning to disrupt a wide range of social structures. They allow for complex contracts that afford information sharing with elaborate rules, new opportunities to monetize creative work, novel organizational structures, and untold future benefits for those who invest the time and effort required to integrate them into their business lives.

Alan R. Dennis
Indiana University
ardennis@indiana.edu

Joseph S. Valacich
University of Arizona
valacich@arizona.edu