ABSTRACT:
In this briefest of the editorial introductions I have written, I commend to your attention the issue devoted to the economic approaches to the nodal aspects of information systems (IS). Considering the role the Journal has played in fostering this domain in our field, it is apposite for such an issue to appear as the second of the JMIS jubilee twenty-fifth year.
The Special Issue, titled "Impact of Information Systems on Market Structure and Function: Developing and Testing Theories," is indeed devoted to theory building and theory testing in the broad swath of the continually expanding and evolving IS influence. Theories are being proposed and tested by papers that probe the effects of IS on both marketplaces and supply chains, and that engage a variety of experimental and analytical methodologies. The Guest Editors of the Special Issue, Eric K. Clemons, Robert J. Kauffman, and Rajiv M. Dewan, add to their prodigious effort also that of introducing the papers to you.
The theme of the economics of IS security, taken up by two of the papers in the Special Issue, is continued by the two further papers in the Journal. Ram L. Kumar, Sungjune Park, and Chandrasekar Subramaniam apply the portfolio approach to the IS security countermeasures. As the functioning of organizations becomes ever more organically dependent on IS, security issues claim the attention of the C-level management and, in the cases of strategically dependent companies, corporate boards. A systematic value-based approach to mounting up corporate IS security countermeasures is necessary. The present authors integrate several theoretical perspectives on the valuation of the security portfolio in the light of security threats, and develop and exercise a simulation model that serves as a tool to include the complex interactions among the various countermeasures.
In another effort to assess the value of IS security investments, Huseyin Cavusoglu, Srinivasan Raghunathan, and Wei T. Yue argue that the series of countermeasures applied consecutively by the firms and the potential attackers calls for a game-theoretic approach. The researchers’ comparison of this approach with the traditional decision-theoretic one shows both the promise and the need to further refine their model by relaxing some of the assumptions they have adopted.
It is my privilege and distinct pleasure to welcome the new members of the JMIS Editorial Board. They are Hemant K. Bhargava (University of California, Davis), David Gefen (Drexel University), Arun Rai (Georgia State University), Timo Saarinen (Helsinki School of Economics), Katherine Stewart (University of Maryland), Kar Yan Tam (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Alfred Taudes (Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration), and Fatemeh "Mariam" Zahedi (University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee). I fully expect that their Board membership will benefit our field.
Vladimir Zwass
Editor-in-Chief