Socio-Technical Affordances for Large-Scale Collaborations: Introduction to a Virtual Special Issue

In this special issue, we review 14 articles published in Organization Science over the past 25 years examining large-scale collaborations (LSCs) tasked with knowledge dissemination and innovation. LSCs involve sizeable pools of participants carrying out a common mission such as developing open-source software, detector technologies, complex architecture, encyclopedias, medical cures, or responses to climate change. LSCs depend on technologies because they are often geographically distributed, incorporate multiple and diverse epistemic perspectives. How such technologies need to be structured and appropriated for effective LSC collaborations has been researched in piecemeal fashion by examining a single technology used in a single collaboration context with little opportunity for generalization. Studies have tended to black box technology use even though they acknowledge such uses to be critical to the LSC operation. We unveil the black box surrounding LSC collaboration technologies by identifying three challenges that LSCs face when they pursue an LSC effort: (1) knowledge exchange challenges, (2) knowledge deliberation challenges, and (3) knowledge combination challenges. We examine how technology was used in responding to these challenges, synthesizing their use into three socio-technical affordances to improve knowledge dissemination efficiency and innovation effectiveness: knowledge collaging, purposeful deliberating, and knowledge interlacing. We demonstrate the intellectual benefit of incorporating socio-technical affordances in studies of LSCs including what small group collaboration research can learn from LSCs.

Estimating the effects of variation in viremia on mosquito susceptibility, infectiousness, and R0 of Zika in Aedes aegypti

Zika virus (ZIKV) is an arbovirus primarily transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes. Like most viral infections, ZIKV viremia varies over several orders of magnitude, with unknown consequences for transmission. To determine the effect of viral concentration on ZIKV transmission risk, we exposed field-derived Ae. aegypti mosquitoes to four doses (103, 104, 105, 106 PFU/mL) representative of potential variation in the field. We demonstrate that increasing ZIKV dose in the blood-meal significantly increases the probability of mosquitoes becoming infected and infectious, as well as the rate at which virus spreads to the saliva, but found no effect on dissemination efficiency or mosquito mortality. We also demonstrate that determining infection using RT-qPCR approaches rather than plaque assays potentially over-estimates key pathogen parameters, including the time at which mosquitoes become infectious and viral burden. Finally, using these data to parameterize an R0 model, we demonstrate that variation in viremia substantially affects transmission risk.

How Investor Structure Influences the Yield, Information Dissemination Efficiency, and Liquidity

This essay focuses on the investor structure of the stock index futures market and uses agent-based computational finance method to discuss how the volume-synchronized probability of informed trading (VPIN) affects market absolute yield, information dissemination efficiency, and liquidity with different ratios of informed traders in the market. The result shows that the higher the proportion of informed traders is, the more the volatility of the market is. Furthermore, the result indicates that when the proportion of informed traders in the stock index futures market accounts for 1/3-1/2, the transparency and liquidity of the market will be better.