Academic Poem for Christof

For reasons of academic ambition, this poem was not compiled in Hohenloher-Fränkisch, Alemannisch, Badisch-Karlsruherisch, Westerwälder Platt or scientific English, but in High-German. This poem is contributed by Christof’s first academic family of the early 1980s. This work would not have been possible without the inspiring spices and brain calories of Jule’s delicious quiche that turned a long poetic session into a memorable scientific breakthrough event.

On the Potency of Online User Representation: Insights from the Sharing Economy

Online user representation (UR) is a cornerstone of platform-mediated interactions within the sharing economy. While the general usefulness of UR artifacts for facilitating online and offline interactions is widely acknowledged and understood, the underlying mechanisms and operating principles often require a more detailed analysis. In this chapter, we thus introduce a systematic framework grounded in signaling and social presence theory for analyzing UR artifacts for online platforms in general—and the sharing economy in particular. We apply our framework as a structural lens in a case study on user profiles on Airbnb, unveiling structural similarities and differences between the opposing market sides. We discuss our findings against the backdrop of emerging information systems research directions and suggest paths for future work on the sharing economy.

Legal Tech and Lawtech: Towards a Framework for Technological Trends in the Legal Services Industry

The use of legal technology (legal tech) and the lawtech ecosystem of legal start-ups has experienced tremendous growth in recent years. To provide a structured approach of analysing IT innovations in the legal sector, we propose a framework for lawtech applications, classifying them into three groups: internal, B2C and B2B applications. In the context of this framework, we examine technological trends in lawtech and their potential to support and transform processes in specific areas of business or personal law. We acknowledge that within lawtech there is a gap between the areas of interest of legal practitioners, IT professionals and academic researchers, and that some areas have received considerable attention by these groups, while other areas have been left relatively unexplored by one or more of these groups. However, the growing interest by legal practitioners in advanced technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) is further closing the gap between academic research, IT professionals and legal practice.

Understanding Emotions in Electronic Auctions: Insights from Neurophysiology

The design of electronic auction platforms is an important field of electronic commerce research. It requires not only a profound understanding of the role of human cognition in human bidding behavior but also of the role of human affect. In this chapter, we focus specifically on the emotional aspects of human bidding behavior and the results of empirical studies that have employed neurophysiological measurements in this regard. By synthesizing the results of these studies, we are able to provide a coherent picture of the role of affective processes in human bidding behavior along four distinct theoretical pathways.

Engineering Energy Markets: The Past, the Present, and the Future

Since the beginning of the energy sector liberalization, the design of energy markets has become a prominent field of research. Markets nowadays facilitate efficient resource allocation in many fields of energy system operation, such as plant dispatch, control reserve provisioning, delimitation of related carbon emissions, grid congestion management, and, more recently, smart grid concepts and local energy trading. Therefore, good market designs play an important role in enabling the energy transition toward a more sustainable energy supply for all. In this chapter, we retrace how market engineering shaped the development of energy markets and how the research focus shifted from national wholesale markets to more decentralized and location-sensitive concepts.

Decision Analytics for Initial Public Offerings: How Filing Sentiment Influences Stock Market Returns

Companies issuing stocks through an initial public offering (IPO) are obligated to publish relevant information as part of a prospectus. Besides quantitative figures from accounting, this document also contains qualitative information in the form of text. In this chapter, we analyze how sentiment in the prospectus influences future stock returns. In addition, we investigate the impact of pre-IPO sentiment in financial announcements on first-day returns. The results of our empirical analyses using 572 IPOs from US companies suggest a negative link between words linked to uncertainty and future stock market returns for up to 10 trading days. Conversely, we find that uncertainty expressed in pre-IPO announcements is positively linked to first-day stock returns. These insights have implications for research on IPOs by demonstrating that future stock returns are also driven by textual information from the prospectus and assist investors in placing their orders.

How at the Institute of Information Systems and Marketing One Thing Leads to Another and Eventually Results in a Low-Trade Theorem

This chapter portrays how research topics arise and develop in the creative environment of the research group Information & Market Engineering of the Institute of Information Systems and Marketing at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. It is somewhat long-winded in the beginning but identifies then a clear goal. In the following, it strays around several lines of research; touches on the question of why something like forecasting markets, the actual research topic, works at all – without answering it; and finally reaches a result that has little to do with the original objective. Along the way, the chapter provides some insights into the economic theory of double auctions.

Studying Conceptual Modeling Processes: A Modeling Tool, Research Observatory, and Multimodal Observation Setup

What do (non-)experienced modelers reason while conceptual modeling and how do they arrive at modeling decisions, which modeling and learning difficulties do they face and why, and how do they overcome these difficulties by tailored modeling tool support are questions of relevance and importance to practicing modelers and, likewise, to conceptual modeling research. For the past 7 years, we have been designing, developing, and evaluating a modeling tool integrating a research observatory aimed at studying individual modeling processes online, in the field, and under laboratory conditions—to contribute to a richer understanding of modeler reasoning and decision-making, to identify common modeling and learning difficulties, and, ultimately, to design tool support to mitigate difficulties and to improve assistance for (non-)experienced modelers. We present an overview of the modeling observatory and of a corresponding multimodal observation setup.

Information and Market Engineering at KIT: Quo Vadis?

Information systems (IS) are nowadays at the core of many personal and institutional activities and influence daily life more than ever before. To understand, evaluate and envision the forms of how we interact with IS, interdisciplinary and multifaceted research efforts are required. At the Information and Market Engineering chair at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, this task is taken head-on via research that stretches from user experiences to system design. In this review, the present research foci at the department are outlined, together with a brief description of its origins and the global developments that underly the necessity of conducting these particular IS studies.

Market Success: The Quest for the Objectives and Success Factors of Markets

Markets are an essential tool to coordinate complex systems. Engineering markets requires the consideration of numerous objectives and factors that will eventually determine the market’s success. These objectives and factors are frequently not well defined or elaborated. Hence, this chapter aims to support market design through a perspective on what determines market success. To this end, we review the literature, consider examples of market success and failure, and reflect on our ongoing work regarding future electricity market design. We provide a framework for market objectives and success factors with a focus on electricity markets. The framework could spur the identification of objectives and success factors of markets in other domains, and inform the engineering of future electricity markets.