The Impact of Blockchain Food Tracing Information Quality and Trust on Intention to Purchase

The purpose of our research is to empirically test how system attributes of blockchain build trust through system and information components in blockchain food traceability systems. Findings showed that system attributes of blockchain are strong predictors of trust leading to intention to purchase. A sample of 358 responses were collected from college students through online survey. SmartPLS 3.0 is adopted for data analysis. We made contributions by building a new research model to guide future studies on trust formation in blockchain based systems as well as informing practice to adopt proven features of blockchain to create and capture values for customers.
Date: August 2022
Creator: Lai, Im Hong
System: The UNT Digital Library

Development and Exploration of End-User Healthcare Technology Acceptance Models

This dissertation consists of three studies that collectively investigate the factors influencing the consumer adoption intention towards emerging healthcare technologies. Essay 1 systematically reviews the extent literature on healthcare technology adoption and serves as the theoretical foundation of the dissertation. It investigates different models that have been previously applied to study healthcare technology acceptance. Meta-analysis method is used to quantitatively synthesize the findings from prior empirical studies. Essay 2 posits, develops, and tests a comprehensive biotechnology acceptance model from the end-user's perspective. Two new constructs, namely, perceived risk and trust in technology, are integrated into the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology. Research hypotheses are tested using survey data and partial least square – structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Essay 3 extends the findings from the Essay 2 and further investigates the consumer's trust initiation and its effect on behavioral adoption intention. To achieve this purpose, Essay 3 posits and develops a trust model. Survey data allows testing the model using PLS-SEM. The models developed in this dissertation reflect significant modifications specific to the healthcare context. The findings provide value for academia, practitioners, and policymakers.
Date: May 2021
Creator: Wei, Xinyu "Eddy"
System: The UNT Digital Library

Information Privacy and Security Associated with Healthcare Technology Use

This dissertation consists of three studies that investigate the information privacy & security associated with healthcare technology use. Essay 1 PRISMA-style systematically reviews the existing literature on privacy information disclosure in IoT technology and serves as the theoretical foundation of the current research. It is crucial to comprehend why, how, and under what consequences individuals choose to disclose their personal and health information since doing so is beneficial to the company. This SLR method allows us to find those factors that significantly impact individuals' behavioral intention to disclose personal information while using IoT technologies. Essay 2 posits, develops, and tests a comprehensive theoretical framework built upon the theory of planned behavior and the health belief model to examine factors affecting willingness to disclose PHI in order to use WFDs. A research survey is designed and distributed to a crowdsourcing platform, Mechanical Turk (M-Turk). Research hypotheses are tested using partial least square – structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). To achieve this purpose, Essay 3 extends the findings from the previous essay and further investigates the caregiver context. Therefore, we developed a novel theoretical model utilizing privacy calculus theory and the technology acceptance model to investigate the willingness of the elderly to disclose …
Date: July 2023
Creator: Amin, M A Shariful
System: The UNT Digital Library

Incorporating Ethics in Delegation To and From Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Information Systems

AI-enabled information systems (AI-enabled IS) offer enhanced utility and efficiency due to their knowledge-based endowments, enabling human agents to assign and receive tasks from AI-enabled IS. As a result, this leads to improved decision-making, ability to manage laborious jobs, and a decrease in human errors. Despite the performance-based endowments and efficiencies, there are significant ethical concerns regarding the use of and delegation to AI-enabled IS, which have been extensively addressed in the literature on the dark side of artificial intelligence (AI). Notable concerns include bias and discrimination, fairness, transparency, privacy, accountability, and autonomy. However, the Information Systems (IS) literature does not have a delegation framework that incorporates ethics in the delegation mechanism. This work seeks to integrate a mixed deontological-teleological ethical system into the delegation mechanism to (and from) AI-enabled IS. To that end, I present a testable model to ethically appraise various AI-enabled IS as well as ethically evaluate delegation to (and from) AI-enabled IS in various settings and situations.
Date: July 2023
Creator: Saeed, Kashif
System: The UNT Digital Library

Quantitative Modeling of Healthcare Services and Biodegradable Medical Supplies

This research presents a mathematical model for the transportation and distribution of COVID-19 vaccine, a simulation model for fleet optimization, and a measurement model for "Healthcare 4.0." Essay 1 examines the development of a distribution model using mixed integer programming (MIP) with the objective of maximizing the number of vaccinated individuals, minimizing transportation costs across the entire network, and ensuring widespread access. This research primarily focuses on the distribution aspect of the vaccine and accordingly devises a model for transportation and distribution that ensures swift and efficient delivery of the COVID-19 vaccine. Essay 2 provides a simulation-based model to enhance logistics performance by including drones along with vaccine trucks and air cargo in the vaccine distribution fleet. The simulation model focuses on minimization of the overall cost of distribution of medical supplies. This second study shows that the types of vehicles utilized have an impact on overall system performance. The selection of the appropriate mix for the mode of transportation impacts transportation costs and lead time. To increase the responsiveness and cost-effectiveness of the logistics system for delivery of the vaccine a proper fleet configuration is required. The model developed in this study is validated via application in Telangana, India …
Date: July 2023
Creator: Kumar, Abhijeet
System: The UNT Digital Library

Three Essays on Collective Privacy and Information Security

In Essay 1, we seek to expand the insights on an individual's decision to share group content. Social networking sites (SNS) have become a ubiquitous means of socializing in the digital age. Using a survey, we collected data from 520 respondents with corporate work experience to test our research model. Our analysis highlights the complex interplay between individual and group factors that shape users' risk-benefit analysis of sharing group content on social networking sites. Furthermore, the results of this study have important implications for social networking site design and policy, particularly with regard to providing granular control over the privacy settings of group content and clear and concise information about the potential risks and benefits of sharing group content. Essay 2 aims to extend the knowledge of information security policy (ISP) compliance. Using a comprehensive approach, we extended the perspective of control mechanisms in the context of ISPs. It is evident that maintaining information security is an important concern for organizations of all sizes and industries. Organizations can establish policies and procedures to regulate and ensure compliance with information security policies, and various control mechanisms can be employed to ensure compliance. Among these control mechanisms, enforcement, punishment, evaluation, and recognition …
Date: July 2023
Creator: Memarian Esfahani, Sara
System: The UNT Digital Library

A Heuristic Approach to Selection of Analytical Methods: Three Empirical Healthcare Studies

Managers rely on analytics to make decisions and the choice of the analytical method can influence their decision-making. This dissertation considers three cases and examines how the choice of analytical methods influence interpretations and implications. These areas are communication for health-related information in social media, health information technology investment by hospitals as it relates to patient satisfaction, and health related expenditure policies of countries. These studies develop theoretical models and empirically test them on primary or secondary data, comparing the performance of popular analytical methods. The conduct of these three studies contributes to a better understanding about the choice of analytical methods and allow development of a heuristic approach by offering guidelines for selecting an appropriate methodology. They demonstrate the value of heuristic approaches for use with non-traditional and traditional statistical methods, as the information gained from non-traditional methods (NNs) provides insights into traditional statistical methods, similar to insights gained from exploratory data analysis. The studies also show the value in examining any dataset with multiple methods because they either confirm each other or fail to confirm, providing insights.
Date: August 2021
Creator: Tarakci, Yasemin
System: The UNT Digital Library

Three Essays on the Role of Social, Legal and Technical Factors on Internet of Things and Smart Contracts Adoption in the Context of COVID-19 Pandemic

I extended and adapted the current technology acceptance models and privacy research to the peculiar context of the COVID-19 pandemic to ascertain the effective "power" of IT in fighting such a pandemic. The research models developed for the purpose of this study contain peculiar modifications to the technological-personal-environmental (TPE) framework and privacy calculus model because of the unique technologies implemented and the peculiar pandemic scenario. I developed three studies that investigate the interaction between social, legal, and technical factors that affect the adoption of IoT devices and blockchain systems implemented to fight the spread of COVID-19. Essay 1 systematically reviews existing literature on the analysis of the social, legal, and technical components in addressing phenomena related to IoT architecture and blockchain technology. The employment of a comparable coding method allows finding which of the above components is prominent in relation to the study of IoT and blockchain. Essay 2 develops a technological acceptance model by integrating the TPE framework with new constructs, i.e., regulatory environment, epidemic ecosystem, pre-epidemic ecosystem, perceived social usefulness, and technical characteristics. Essay 3 further explores the interplay between social, legal, and technical factors toward the adoption of smart contracts in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. …
Date: May 2022
Creator: Guerra, Katia
System: The UNT Digital Library

Factors Influencing Continued Usage of Telemedicine Applications

This study addresses the antecedents of individuals' disposition to use telemedicine applications, as well as the antecedents of their usage to provide insight into creating sustained usage over time. The theoretical framework of this research is Bhattacherjee's expectation-confirmation IS continuance model. By combining a series of key factors which may influence the initial and continued usage of telemedicine applications with key constructs of Bhattacherjee's IS continuance model, this study aims to provide a deeper understanding of barriers to telemedicine app usage and how to facilitate continued use of these apps. Online survey data was collected from college students who are telemedicine application users. A total of 313 responses were gathered, and data analysis was conducted using SmartPLS 3. This dissertation contributes by looking at the IS adoption and IS continuance research simultaneously to connect these two research streams as well as suggesting the usage context of some established IS theory being different with regard to healthcare applications.
Date: August 2022
Creator: Liu, Xiaoyan
System: The UNT Digital Library

An Analysis of Information Technology (IT) Post-Adoption Behavior

The primary focus of this research is explicating the role of emotion in IT post-adoption behavior. Studied in the context of intelligent personal assistants (IPA), a class of conversational artificial intelligence (AI), the first study integrates elements from computer science, communications, and IS disciplines. The research identifies two constructs vital for speech-based technologies, natural language understanding, and feedback, and examines their role in use decisions. This work provides guidance to practice on how best to allocate R&D investments in conversational AI. The second essay examines the IT continuance through the theoretical lens of the expectation-confirmation model (ECM), incorportating cognitive and emotional satisfaction into the ECM framework. Empirical testing of the model suggests that it offers additional clarity on IT continuance phenomena and provides a significant improvement to the explanatory power of ECM in the context of an emerging technology. The third essay is one of the earliest efforts to conceptualize and test a theoretical model that considers emotional attachment in IT continuance behavior. This essay develops a novel model to investigate this phenomenon based on emotional attachment theory, and empirically validates the proposed model in the context of conversational artificial intelligence systems. While the existing theories of IT continuance focus …
Date: August 2020
Creator: Mamun, Md Rasel Al
System: The UNT Digital Library

Does Quality Management Practice Influence Performance in the Healthcare Industry?

This research examines the relationship between quality management (QM) practices and performance in the healthcare industry via the conduct of three studies. The results of this research contribute both to advancing QM theory as well as in developing a unique text mining method that is illustrated by examining QM in the healthcare industry. Essay 1 explains the relationship between operational performance and QM practices in the healthcare industry. This study analyzed the findings from the literature using meta-analysis. We applied confirmatory semantic analysis (CSA) to examine the Baldrige winners' applications. Essay 2 examines the benefits associated with an effective QM program in the healthcare industry. This study addressed the research question about how effective QM practice results in improved hospital performance. This study compares the performance of Baldrige Award-winning hospitals with matching hospitals, state average, and national average. The results show that the Baldrige Award can lead to an increase in patient satisfaction in certain periods. Essay 3 discusses the contribution of an online clinic appointment system (OCAS) to QM practices. An enhanced trust model was built on understanding the mechanism of patients' trust formation in the OCAS. Understanding the determinants related to patients' trust and willingness to use OCAS …
Date: August 2020
Creator: Xie, Heng
System: The UNT Digital Library

Three Essays on Phishing Attacks, Individual Susceptibility, and Detection Accuracy

Phishing is a social engineering attack to deceive and persuade people to divulge private information like usernames and passwords, account details (including bank account details), and social security numbers. Phishers typically utilize e-mail, chat, text messages, or social media. Despite the presence of automatic anti-phishing filters, phishing messages reach online users' inboxes. Understanding the influence of phishing techniques and individual differences on susceptibility and detection accuracy is an important step toward creating comprehensive behavioral and organizational anti-phishing awareness programs. This dissertation seeks to achieve a dual purpose in a series of three essays. Essay 1 seeks to explore the nature of phishing threats that including identifying attack intentions, and psychological and design techniques of phishing attacks. Essay 2 seeks to understand the relative influence of attack techniques and individual phishing experiential traits on people's phishing susceptibility. Essay 3 seeks to understand an individual's cognitive and affective differences that differentiate between an individual's phishing detection accuracy.
Date: August 2022
Creator: Bera, Debalina
System: The UNT Digital Library

Robust Methodology in Evaluating and Optimizing the Performance of Decision Making Units: Empirical Financial Evidence

Intelligent algorithm approaches that augment the analytical capabilities of traditional techniques may improve the evaluation and performance of decision making units (DMUs). Crises such as the massive COVID-19 pandemic-related shock to businesses have prompted the deployment of analytical tools to provide solutions to emerging complex questions with incredible speed and accuracy. Performance evaluation of DMUs (e.g., financial institutions) is challenging and often depends on the sophistication and robustness of analytical methods. Therefore, advances in analytical methods capable of accurate solutions for competitive real-world applications are essential to managers. This dissertation introduces and reviews three robust methods for evaluating and optimizing the decision-making processes of DMUs to assist managers in enhancing the productivity and performance of their operational goals. The first essay proposes a robust search field division method, which improves the performance of evolutionary algorithms. The second essay proposes a robust double judgment approach method that enhances the efficiency of the data envelopment analysis method. The third essay proposes a robust general regression neural network method to examine the effect of shocks on GDP loss caused by COVID-19 on the global economy. These three essays contribute to optimization methodology by introducing novel robust techniques for managers of DMUs to improve …
Date: August 2022
Creator: Gharoie Ahangar, Reza
System: The UNT Digital Library

Extensions of the Neural Network Models into Applications and Comparisons with General Linear Models

This dissertation is designed to answer the following questions: (1) Which measurement model is better to contribute to the research model in different areas? (2) Within a given model, how does the data size influence the performance of a neural network (NN) and some other methods? (3) Compared to partial least square (PLS), ordinary least square (OLS), XGBoost, how is the performance of NN? Essay 1 systematically compares PLS-SEM to ANN and builds the hybrid vehicle purchasing intention model (HVPIM). It investigates different models that have been previously applied to study the theory of planned behavior (TPB). The methods find those factors that significantly correlated with consumer purchase intention. Essay 2 posits, develops, and tests a PNN model with healthcare data. A research survey is designed and distributed to undergraduate students from a major research school in the U.S. southwest region. Research hypotheses are tested using PLS-SEM and PNN. Essay 3 targets on testing the performance of the NN model with panel data from the soccer transfer market. To achieve this purpose, the essay posits and develops an empirical test built on game theory. The NN model is tested and compared to OLS and XGBoost. As the research compares the …
Date: August 2021
Creator: Wang, Yuchen
System: The UNT Digital Library

Three Essays on Information Privacy: Awareness, Sharing, and Resilience

This work embraces three essays on information privacy: 1) Measures of Personal Information Privacy in Social Networks: Information Control and Situation Awareness, 2) Care to Share your Personal Information? and 3) Privacy Breaches: How Resilient Are You? Every transaction made either online or offline, and every social interaction that is transferred or stored electronically in some way, are generally consumed as big data and ultimately drives the analytics from which consumers benefit. However, this raises some concerns about privacy and ethics. For example, should companies that consumers interact with be allowed to sell their personal information? Consumers derive certain benefits such as personalized content when they choose to offer their data to many websites. However, consumers providing personal data to websites subject themselves to possible privacy invasion when third parties purchase their data. In this case, since the consumer willfully gave away their personal information, is it genuinely personal, and should they retain some, if any, control over it? Theories such as privacy calculus and protection motivation theory (PMT) are a couple of prominent examples that focus on the privacy risks and benefits that drive consumer behavior. However, there is still a lack of research on the instantiation of privacy …
Date: August 2021
Creator: Kim, Kevin
System: The UNT Digital Library

Optimizing Value Co-Creation in Education Supply Chains: An Evaluation of Determinants and Resiliency in Service Systems

Services and service-based business are a major part of any economy. However, service-based supply chains require a greater level of interaction between provider and consumer than the traditional manufacturing or product-based supply chain. Therefore, they require optimization and resiliency models that acknowledge the constraints and goals unique to service-based industries. Value co-creation and service-dominant logistics (SDL) are relatively new to operations research. Existing literature in management science provides a framework for value co-creation but does not provide a model for optimizing value cocreation and resiliency in a complex or dynamic systems such as education supply chains (ESC). This dissertation addresses these knowledge gaps through 3 essays. The first essay establishes a method for optimizing investment in resiliency measures when utilizing parallel supply chains. The essay examines the intersection of value co-creation theory between higher education and service-dominant logistics (SDL) to understand the role of supply chain elements in value cocreation. The second essay provides a theoretical approach to incorporating resilience planning into the customer relationship management model. The final essay establishes a method for optimizing investment in resiliency measures when utilizing parallel service supply chains.
Date: August 2022
Creator: Smith, Justin Thomas
System: The UNT Digital Library

Augmented Reality Intentions in Social Networking and Retail Apps

This dissertation contributes to IS research by explaining user intentions while using AR features in mobile social networking and retail app contexts. It consists of three essays, which use partial least squares modeling to analyze different consumer behavior models. The first essay examines the influence of quality, human, and environmental factors on AR reuse intention in a mobile social networking context. The second essay introduces position relevance, a new construct essential to AR research in e-commerce, and it looks at the influence of this construct and app involvement on user purchase intention, while using view-in-room features on mobile retail apps. The third essay examines the influence of service quality and visual quality on recommendation intention of mobile retail apps while using view-in-room features compared to shopping without using these AR features.
Date: August 2020
Creator: David, Alsius
System: The UNT Digital Library

Three Essays on Social Media Use and Information Sharing Behavior

Social media platforms create rich social structures, expand users' boundaries of social networks and revolutionize traditional forms of communications, social interactions and social relationships. These platforms not only facilitate the creation and sharing of news and information, but they also drive various kinds of businesses models, processes and operations, knowledge sharing, marketing strategies for brand management and socio-political discourses essential for healthy and democratic functions. As such, social media has greater implications on organizations and society brought about by individuals' social media usage patterns, and therefore, calls for further investigations. The main objective of this dissertation is to explore and offer insights into such social media usage and information sharing behaviors via data driven examination of various theories. This dissertation involves three studies that focus on factors that explain individuals' three different social media usage behaviors. Essay 1 investigates individuals' perceived importance of online affiliation, self-esteem, self-regulation and risk-benefit structure as antecedents of users' geo-tagging behavior on social media. Essay 2 examines the role of online news quality, source credibility, individuals' perception towards online civic engagement, attitude towards news sharing and social influences to understand users' news sharing behavior on social media platforms. Essay 3 seeks to examine the individuals' …
Date: May 2021
Creator: Bhagat, Sarbottam
System: The UNT Digital Library