Competitive Strategy, Economics and IS: An Introduction to the Mini-Track

The mini-track kicks off with papers that involve managerial decision-making strategies for software development and products, and new IT investments. V. C. Choudhary, author of "Software as a Service: Implications for Investment in Software Development," models firm decision-making on the adoption of alter-native approaches to selling software. The results deal with the differences in optimal investments in software, and the related pricing and market coverage choices for different licensing approaches. Then B. Iyer, C.H. Lee, and D. Dreyfuss, in "Competing in the Era of Emergent Architecture: The Case of Packaged Software Industry," explore packaged software industry clusters with a software stack perspective. They show why firms with complementary products are better performers than those without. The session closes with "Modeling Network Decisions under Uncertainty: Countervailing Externalities and Embedded Options," by Robert J. Kauffman and Ajay Kumar, who model IT investment strategy decision-making settings that involve positive and negative externalities tradeoffs, for which real op-tions thinking result in value-maximizing payoffs.