Studies on the informativeness, value, and cost, of information and information systems

The widely used database technology and more recent developments in networking and Web technologies are encouraging diversity in the utilization of existing data. Data are now routinely pooled from multiple systems and physical locations, and integrated in creative ways for various decision-making purposes. From a managerial perspective, however, there are growing concerns in regard to the quality of the output information, and the economic justification of costly investments in such technologies. The major part of this dissertation addresses these concerns through formal studies on the quality and value of information, based on information economics (IE) theory. The quality and value of information integration is studied from a standpoint that recognizes the fundamental role of information integration in information systems. The objective of this study is to create a domain-independent theoretical framework that can facilitate decision making on information integration. The framework classifies information integration situations using two information quality characteristics--informativeness and dependence--and links different conditions in terms of these characteristics with different predictions on the value of integration. A second, related study centers on the questions of whether improving the accuracy of the input of an information system guarantees higher accuracy and economic value of its output, especially higher accuracy and economic value of forecasts. The study offers sufficient conditions under which the answer to these questions is positive, and also presents counter examples that suggest conditions under which the answer is negative. The results point to a contextual factor that can affect accuracy both ways--positive or negative--which has been ignored by data quality theory. This factor is dependence between errors. A third study considers a question related to software economics. Software economics theory equates software with code and directs that the supply of information be based entirely on demand patterns. However, an increasingly common custom in the software market to bundle the code with services indicates that a different model of cost and price may apply in many cases. Such model combines the information goods cost model with a service cost model. The study focuses on the question of the validity of such alternative model