Lee examines these proposals, and offers the perspective that the authors' assertions about positive feedback, compatibility and network effects have equal application to tangible goods, not just information goods. Hahn, based on his prior graduate work in South Korea, is already an accomplished author in the area of human cognition and system design. In fact, part of the difficulty that firms face today in having their websites adopted by customers, buyers and suppliers is that no standards exist for the organization of information, the indexing of content, and the basic elements of website navigation design. The people who contributed these review essays are now second-year doctoral students in Information and Decision Science at the Carlson School of Management of the University of Minnesota. The seminar provided the participants with a broad and interdisciplinary appreciation of the directions that leading EC researchers from around the world are taking to study the issues.
Interested readers are welcome to visit the course website for an overview of the course contents.
One of the participants' assignments was to review three books, and then select one among them for a more focused essay. A third goal was to show them how to leverage the power of iteration in writing. Most students who enter doctoral programs in Information Systems and other business school disciplines have an insufficient appreciation of writing as a process, as opposed to writing as the product. The product only gets better once the process is tuned up for high performance. Viewed this way, I feel it is important from a pedagogical standpoint to down-size the overall length of some of the students' written deliverables in my seminars.