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Costello College of Business health care research puts “patients at the center”

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:55:18 +0000

Costello College of Business health care research puts “patients at the center” Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 03/11/2025 - 11:55

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Nirup Menon

Like virtually every other industry, health care is increasingly prioritizing digital transformation. The sector is unique, however, in that its results are measured not only in business terms but also tangible outcomes for people—often, literal life and death. So are newly acquired technologies actually paying off for patients?

Nirup Menon, a professor of information systems at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at George Mason �鶹��, says that the answer is “not always.”

Nirup Menon

His recently published paper in Decision Support Systems tackles the so-called “HIT paradox,” or the widespread perception that health information technologies (HIT) have not yet moved the needle on important outcomes such as productivity, quality of care, and patient safety.

Menon co-authored the paper with Costello colleagues Amitava Dutta and Sidhartha Das.

Based on comprehensive survey data from approximately 6,000 U.S. hospitals, the research team looked into whether those that adopted Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) saw lower mortality rates for cardiac patients.

“CDSS is not only for cardiologists,” Menon explains. “It is hospital-based—a system that helps with clinical decision-making. But we know that many cardiac patients may not necessarily have cardiac as their only problem. There are probably decisions being made about them using all kinds of ailments and medications, and so on.”

The basic idea behind CDSS is to use technology to mine actionable insights from a wealth of patient data, giving clinicians key tools to make informed decisions at the point of care. Theoretically, a hospital with CDSS solutions should be much better equipped to handle complex cases—such as a heart-attack sufferer with diabetes or another comorbidity—in real time than one without.

However, Menon and his co-authors discovered that when it came to preventing deaths from cardiac emergencies, the impact of CDSS was context-specific. Their paper finds a number of complementary effects suggesting that health care technologies need help from their environment in order to be most effective. For example, the presence of cardiac medical services (CMS), e.g. diagnostic catheterization and electrophysiology, was unsurprisingly associated with lower mortality rates—but CMS combined with CDSS was more impactful than either on its own.

“The labor force—by which I mean the physician and the entire team of nurses and technicians—should be trained to use this technology appropriately,” Menon summarizes. “You also need real-time integration between CDSS and other IT systems, because if it’s not well-integrated, the provider will not have all the data at their fingertips. If you don’t provide the right inputs into a CDSS, it’s not going to give you the right outputs.”

Menon points out that the “HIT paradox” isn’t limited to CDSS or any single technology. President Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package, after all, included tens of billions in financial incentives for health care providers to digitize their patient records. By 2017, 95 percent of U.S. hospitals had adopted electronic patient records. Yet, as Menon tells it, “hospitals are just chugging along. The quality remains the same and the costs are just increasing. Or you might see improvements in one small department. So we are trying to find the variables that create complementarities within large samples.”

Menon knows, however, that the applications of health care tech can be closely targeted to relatively tiny patient populations, too. Another recent paper of his, published in JMIR Medical Informatics, uses causal survival forests, a machine-learning algorithmic technique, to determine which of two chemotherapy drugs promoted the most longevity for terminal prostate cancer patients. Taking into account age, race and comorbidity symptoms, their analysis produced an easy-to-use prescription policy tree that, by itself, could extend patients’ lives by almost two months—if the test sample, comprised of 2,886 veterans treated at VA health centers, was representative of the wider patient population.

“If you go down every branch of the policy tree, the numbers become very small,” Menon says. “It almost becomes like personalized medicine, because you can factor in age, race, gender—although gender didn’t matter in our study—PSA numbers, bilirubin numbers, etc.”

Menon has ongoing research projects aimed at improving health care through technology, at both the patient level (a la the prostate cancer study) and the ecosystem level (a la the CDSS study). One paper in progress focuses on Covid-19 and how the data-sets research scientists selected for their studies influenced their findings. Another looks at telemedicine’s effects on quality of care.

“My foray into health care began with my PhD dissertation, which was on IT in hospitals,” Menon says. “At that time, I was working primarily from a hospital administration point of view. As a business school researcher, it seemed logical to stay there. But as you come across more problems, and you read more, you realize that the patient is the center of everything, not the hospital.”

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Would you rather buy from a cuddly chatbot, or the “Lipstick King”?

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:03:48 +0000

Would you rather buy from a cuddly chatbot, or the “Lipstick King”? Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 03/04/2025 - 13:03

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Si Xie

Historically, entertainment and advertising have worked as a tag team, taking turns soliciting attention from audiences. But our social-media age is blending the two into new, hybrid forms.

Witness livestream shopping, a seamless amalgam of e-commerce and entertainment. In place of one-way messaging delivered by polished pitchpeople, this model employs relatable influencers presenting products for online sale—and chatting with consumers—in real-time sessions that often last several hours.

Famously popular in China, livestream shopping is picking up steam in the United States. In June 2024, as an example, U.S. TikTok netted its first million-dollar livestream, courtesy of Texas-based brand Canvas Beauty. By 2026, live shopping may be responsible for as much as five percent of all e-commerce sales in the U.S., according to industry projections.

For global brands, this means a possible revenue explosion. But for information-systems scholars like Si Xie, assistant professor at Costello College of Business, the global rise of livestream shopping represents an unprecedented research opportunity.

Si Xie

“One of the most important elements of livestream shopping is the interaction,” Xie says. “Livestreams bring all potential buyers into the same virtual room, together with the influencer. People can see which products have been put in the online shopping cart, and which have been purchased.”

Her recently published paper in Production & Operations Management finds that the longer an individual product is showcased in a livestream featuring several different brands, the more revenue it will generate. Yet as product showcase duration goes up, overall revenue from the livestream goes down.

To reach their conclusions, the research team—including co-authors Siddhartha Sharma of Indiana �鶹�� and Amit Mehra of �鶹�� of Texas at Dallas—analyzed data from nearly 75,000 livestreams conducted in China during 2021.

For Xie, the findings point to a fundamental conflict between the incentives of livestreamers and the brands they promote. It is in the best interest of third-party influencers to move fairly rapidly between different types of products, but brands will want more airtime devoted to each one.

“People like variety,” Xie explains. “If I watch a livestream and all I see are shirts in different fabrics, I might feel there are not too many choices I can make. However, if you show me a shirt and then a pair of pants, I can make an outfit. There’s a higher probability of my making more purchases, and that’s in line with the third-party livestreamers’ incentives.”

One way to correct these misaligned incentives would be for brands to use the power of the purse to influence the influencers. In China, even the suggestion of such corrupting relationships has caused public scandal. In 2023, for example, top livestreamer Li Jiaqi (nicknamed “The Lipstick King” for his ability to sell beauty products) lost one million followers on social media after lashing out at an online commenter who complained about the high price of an eyebrow pencil made by Chinese cosmetics company Florasis. Li, Florasis’s most prominent brand ambassador, was excoriated for ostensibly putting his relationship with the brand above empathy for financially struggling consumers.

“People were saying, ‘you are trying to be defensive of the product because you get so much interest from selling that pencil’”, Xie says. “Therefore, Li’s credibility was really impaired.”

If Xie’s paper describes how human imperfections can jeopardize livestream shopping, could AI be the answer? Indeed, AI-powered animated chatbots — both paired with human influencers, and serving customers solo during off-peak sales hours — have become commonplace on China’s livestreams. For her PhD dissertation, Xie probed data from more than 70,000 livestreams in China and found that introducing an AI assistant boosted livestream sales by about 18%. But the effect steadily declined over time — and not because the novelty wore off. The rapidly improving algorithmic responses had the unintended consequence of shorter watch durations, which may have reduced impulse buying. Xie’s suggested remedy? “The owner of the gen-AI tools could modify the interaction between the virtual livestreamer and the audience to encourage more engagement, perhaps by adjusting the learning speed to ensure that the audience remains engaged for a longer period."

Xie also suggests that brands and channels replace humanoid avatars with cute, cuddly “mascots” that users just can’t bring themselves to click away from.

Xie says she’s working on future papers that tease insights out of livestream data. “One good thing about this new technology is that it promotes the user to buy using methods we can observe. Livestreamers sell general items like grocery items and clothing, as well as expensive stuff like cars and houses, and you can really see how people behave.”

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George Mason professor furthers impact of telemedicine in Ukraine

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 22:39:16 +0000

George Mason professor furthers impact of telemedicine in Ukraine Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 01/14/2025 - 17:39

Ukraine’s health care system has been hit hard amid the ongoing war. Power outages, staffing shortages, and the destruction of hospitals have added up to a drastic reduction in available care for the already-vulnerable population. In a desperate attempt to bridge the gap, Ukraine’s Ministry of Health opened the country to telehealth solutions from overseas. But will these prove to be a successful substitute for at least some necessary services, or turn out to be no better than a tech Band-Aid?

Answering that question is where Mariia Petryk, assistant professor of information systems and operations management at the Costello College of Business at George Mason �鶹��, comes in. In her spare time, she works as volunteer director of analytics for TeleHelp Ukraine (THU).

Mariia Petryk

Founded by a cross-disciplinary group of Stanford students shortly after the war’s inception, THU was designed to succeed where other telemedicine initiatives in crisis-affected areas have failed. The founders worked tirelessly to assemble an international volunteer network comprising medical professionals, translators, interpreters and administrative “health navigators.” Aware that medical consultations were only part of the patient journey, THU’s founders sought to address the entire continuum of care.

Petryk stresses that while the project originated at Stanford, the technical team included “people from Chicago, Boston, other California schools…some very active volunteers were in Australia, South Korea, Canada and other countries.”

Petryk, herself of Ukrainian descent, was honored to lend her data science expertise to this worthy project. As analytics director, she manages a dozen or so number-crunching volunteers who measured and documented THU’s impact upon Ukraine’s displaced population during the initiative’s first full year.

As Petryk explains, “The Russian invasion created a humanitarian crisis where a lot of people were internally displaced. And when people relocate to a new place, they don’t know where to go for health care. They also are at higher risk for many issues, including mental health problems. And they don’t know where to turn to treat chronic diseases they may have.”

THU’s primary focus during its first year was delivering much-needed services to this population of war-ravaged internal exiles.

Petryk’s analytical work gave rise to a recent case study of THU published in Journal of Global Health. The paper’s other lead author was Aditya Narayan, a Stanford medical student and THU’s director of implementation and evaluation.

Their findings describe some impressive early successes. THU facilitated more than 1,200 virtual patient appointments from May 2022 to May 2023 alone. Despite often-chaotic conditions, patient attendance rates were above 70 percent for nine of the 13 months studied. As the first year wore on, the THU team found ways to prevent no-shows—for example, employing the popular texting platform Viber to communicate with patients and assigning an individual health navigator to each patient.

Even more impressively, 96 percent of patients reported that their health complaints were at least partially resolved during their visit.

The paper argues that aspects of THU’s model could be adapted for use in other humanitarian contexts. In its initial growth phase, THU had access to advanced technological infrastructure and a wide network of medical providers, by dint of its academic origins. This implies that partnerships with academia could be critical to replicating THU’s success outside Ukraine.

Petryk remains proud of THU’s impact and her role in helping define it. “Based on actual appointments and how much that amount of care would cost at a hospital, THU delivered an estimated $1 million worth of services in its first 13 months,” she says.

Looking ahead to THU’s future, she says, “I can only wish to see this ‘start-up,’ as it were, go for the IPO.”

For more information and to explore volunteering opportunities, visit THU’s website.

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Mariia Petryk

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Are U.S. ‘news deserts’ hothouses of corruption?

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 16:35:27 +0000

Are U.S. ‘news deserts’ hothouses of corruption? Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 11/19/2024 - 11:35

The March 24, 2021 edition of neighborhood newspaper Northeast News, out of Kansas City, Missouri, contained a surprise for its 9,000 subscribers. Where the front-page news should have been, there was a big, blank white space. This was no printer’s error, but a last-ditch cry for help. After 89 years in operation, Northeast News had found itself on the brink of insolvency due to the loss of key advertisers amid the COVID pandemic. The empty front page was designed to remind the community of what it would lose if its only local paper went under.

The gambit went viral, prompting a flood of online donations that is keeping the paper afloat, for now. Ironically, Northeast News owes its existence to the very force that has fueled the more general decline of local journalism in America—the internet.

Brad Greenwood

As advertiser dollars migrated to Facebook and Google, the business model that supported local newspapers for generations came to the edge of collapse. Since 2004, more than 2,500 American newspapers have ceased publication—around one-quarter of the total. Overall newspaper circulation has declined by more than half since 1990.

To be sure, digital alternatives have rushed in to fill the gap, such as citizen-journalist websites, nonprofit news organs, partisan blogs, etc. So, the question represented by the blank front page of Northeast News resonates: What do communities lose when newspapers fold that online journalism startups haven’t (so far, at least) been able to replace?

In the past, industry observers and researchers have linked community newspaper closure to diminished civic trust and political participation, among other negative effects. New research from Brad Greenwood, the Maximus Corporate Partner Professor of Business at the Costello College of Business at George Mason �鶹��, builds on this discourse, finding evidence that when local papers topple, political corruption springs up in their wake.

Greenwood’s paper, coauthored by Ted Matherly of Tulane �鶹��, was published in MIS Quarterly.

The researchers focused on U.S. federal districts that lost a major daily newspaper during the years 1996 to 2019. They compared the number of corruption charges (bribery, embezzlement, fraud, etc.), defendants, and cases filed in district court before and after the newspaper closure. The results were striking: Overall, the disappearance of a newspaper delivered a 6.9% increase in charges, a 6.8% increase in the number of indicted defendants and a 7.4% increase in cases filed.

“We looked at federal charges for three reasons. First, the overwhelming amount of statutory enforcement occurs federally. Second, it gives us a uniform definition of what constitutes corruption across every domestic jurisdiction. Finally, and most importantly, federal conviction rates are over 90%,” Greenwood says. “They don’t charge people unless they have a good-faith belief they will prevail at trial.”

Moreover, post-newspaper corruption cases were more likely to go to trial as opposed to resolving in a plea deal, thus incurring greater public costs.

“In an age of misinformation, the solution is not rejecting the professional press, it is embracing it, and ensuring that well-trained and hard-working men and women have both the ability and venue to hold those in power to account."

Greenwood and Matherly also examined whether digital-era upstarts were adequate substitutes for newspapers, in terms of curtailing corruption. They tracked 352 such websites, and found they had no impact on the number of charges, defendants or cases in the districts concerned.

“While it’s hard to say precisely why we don’t see an effect from online news, there are several candidate explanations. Not only do citizen journalists lack the standing and training to tackle questions of public corruption and elevate discourse in the public square, but many of these sites aren’t even legitimate news vendors,” says Greenwood, referencing what are commonly referred to as “pink slime websites.”

Greenwood goes on to suggest that the corruption-preventing power of the defunct papers came not necessarily from journalistic acumen, but rather from the ability to elevate the actions bad actors had taken in public discourse, a process journalism researchers refer to as agenda setting.

Whatever the cause, the ramifications for society are very real. In the Northern District of Illinois alone, corruption-related cases involving more than 1,700 officials cost taxpayers a staggering $550 million per year from 1976 to 2012. The coffers of communities that lose newspapers may suffer more than most, since these cases tend to end up in expensive courtroom proceedings rather than plea deals.

Further, the study only looks at corrupt officials who got caught. Presumably, there are many more whose corruption went unpunished.

All told, these findings suggest that community newspapers should not be regarded as just another business model ill-adapted to digital disruption that should be allowed to fail. Their demise comes at significant public cost, financial and otherwise. “In an age of misinformation, the solution is not rejecting the professional press, it is embracing it, and ensuring that well-trained and hard-working men and women have both the ability and venue to hold those in power to account,” Greenwood says.

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Brad Greenwood

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The NYPD gave officers iPhones. Here’s what we learned about race and policing

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 16:50:43 +0000

The NYPD gave officers iPhones. Here’s what we learned about race and policing Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 06/04/2024 - 12:50

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Brad Greenwood

The controversy about biased policing seems to draw endless fuel from race-based differences in public perception. Simply put, the vast majority of White citizens in the United States believe the police are doing a good job, including on issues of racial equality, while a similar percentage of Black citizens hold the opposite opinion. And while a growing number of studies have indicated persistent patterns of racial discrimination in policing, an emergent concern among scholars is that the data these papers rely on are also subject to baked-in biases, since they often derive from officers’ self-reports of their own behavior.

Brad Greenwood

Enter Brad Greenwood, professor of information systems and operations management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at George Mason �鶹��. One of his research interests lies in how digital technologies are bringing unprecedented transparency to police practices. For example, Greenwood’s 2022 paper documented how the introduction of body-worn cameras for the New York Police Department (NYPD) resulted in a significant reduction in abuse-of-authority complaints.

His latest work on policing is forthcoming in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Along with Gordon Burtch from Boston �鶹�� and Jeremy Watson from the �鶹�� of Minnesota, Greenwood examined the recent rollout of iPhones across the NYPD, which included a series of digital tools designed to replace the handwritten memo books officers previously relied on. Instead of scribbling in the physical books, which NYPD officers were required to hang onto even into retirement, officers could log their activities directly into a centralized database maintained by the NYPD. These detailed digital records shed fresh light on how cops spend their time—and attention—on the beat.

The researchers tracked data on NYPD stops and complaints in 2017 and 2018, the period when iPhones were being rolled out across precincts in New York City. A curious pattern emerged. There was an 18% increase in reported stops after a precinct received iPhones, which would be consistent with the digital tools making it easier for officers to report a citizen interaction. Further, the researchers discovered that this increase resulted in neither more arrests nor more complaints from the public. It wasn’t, therefore, that the phones were somehow causing the police to stop people more often, but rather that so-called “unproductive stops”—those leading to no further action—were being reported more often.

However, when breaking the results down across White and non-White citizens, the researchers found that unproductive stops involving non-White citizens were entirely responsible for the increase. In other words, the observed changes were based on police encounters with non-White members of the public, that would likely have gone unreported in the days of pen and paper. More specifically, after switching to the smartphone system, officers logged 22% more stops involving non-White citizens, while the number of reported stops of White citizens remained unchanged. These are statistical averages—the pattern was more marked in high-crime neighborhoods and those with a greater proportion of non-White residents.

Greenwood offered an interpretation of the finding: “The concern here is that we have an underreporting, which is concentrated in certain groups and means that we need to be cautious when interpreting prior work. On the one hand, it opens the door to bias in police interactions with civilians being worse than initially anticipated, at least based on the frequency of stops. On the other hand, it could mean that older data doesn’t accurately reflect the likelihood of an arrest once a stop occurs. And we need to be doubly cautious, because we don’t know if officers are reporting stops more frequently just because it is easier, or for some other reason.”

Greenwood cautions against making sweeping conclusions based on the study. “The only thing we know for sure is that more and deeper work is needed by scholars and policy makers to ensure transparency between law enforcement and the people they are charged to protect,” he said.

On the whole, however, the study raises the possibility that race-based disparities in policing are not only very real, but may have been underestimated thus far because of reporting gaps.

As police officers are not obligated to document all civilian interactions, their decisions regarding what—and what not—to report can be biased. The introduction of new technology, as in the case of the NYPD, can help counter such biases, but is not the only avenue worth pursuing. The researchers recommend that police departments “investigate the appropriate organizational complements (i.e., policies and procedures) necessary to uncover and eliminate such biases.”

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George Mason faculty are tackling cybersecurity’s talent pipeline problem

Jennifer Anzaldi — Fri, 10 May 2024 17:01:06 +0000

George Mason faculty are tackling cybersecurity’s talent pipeline problem Jennifer Anzaldi Fri, 05/10/2024 - 13:01

If you’re a cybercriminal, the latest news on cybersecurity talent shortfalls should put a smile on your face. For example, the majority of cybersecurity leaders report that their teams are understaffed, and they have problems retaining qualified professionals.

But for Nirup Menon, a George Mason �鶹�� professor of information systems and operations management (ISOM), and Brian Ngac, an instructor in the ISOM area, this workforce challenge is a golden career opportunity for the young people of Northern Virginia and the Washington, D.C., area.

Nirup Menon and Brian Ngac

The pair recently won a two-year award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, to create unique experiential learning opportunities and workshops designed to enhance cybersecurity education and workforce development.

Working closely with industry partners Mobius Consulting and Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), Menon and Ngac will recruit and help select students to work on actual cybersecurity projects. “They need to have taken some fundamental cyber class ahead of time,” Menon clarifies. “We want students with a commitment to the field. It allows you to get experience but it’s also competitive.”

Throughout the 12-week projects, students will receive mentoring both from the industry participant and from business faculty. “We run it in an agile scrum-like manner,” Ngac says. “Every week, we ask ‘What did you do?’ ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘What are the challenges that are impacting your work?’” If students run into trouble, faculty mentors can work with industry managers to help them get back on track.

“We’re trying to build not just the cyber workforce but the skills as well,” Ngac says.

Menon and Ngac have developed a specialty in this type of hands-on learning, which they have dubbed the Professional Readiness Experiential Program (PREP). More than 100 Virginia-based undergraduates and 20 industry participants have participated in PREP, which includes projects funded by two Commonwealth Cybersecurity Initiative Experiential Learning grants in collaboration with Mobius and IDA.

“PREP not only focuses on cybersecurity projects, but also works on many business process improvement projects,” says Ngac. "Honors and high-performing ISOM students work on real-world projects with industry participants on identifying technical solutions to business challenges through rigorous research, modelling, analysis, quantification, risk management, implementation planning, and, at times, execution.”

The NIST award also incorporates workshops for students who are new to cybersecurity but interested in exploring it as a career option. Workshops will be launched in collaboration with Trinity Washington �鶹�� (TWU), an HBCU whose College of Arts and Sciences is women-only. For a field such as cybersecurity, which continues to face diversity challenges, the participation of organizations such as TWU is essential.

“We want to bring in students who have not thought of cybersecurity as a field, because they think it’s all engineering, hacking and coding,” Menon says. The workshops will emphasize the variety of functions that are integral to the space, such as management and auditing, in addition to engineering.

Students and industry participants in the current CCI Experiential Learning Projects

“It’s not just tech, there may be creativity involved in anticipating scams and threats,” Ngac explains. “These are different things we’ll be bringing up in the workshop in terms of roleplaying what cybercriminals might do, or how someone might try to socially engineer an attack.”

Unlike a standard grant, the NIST award is structured as a cooperative agreement in which the funding agency will collaborate in shaping and delivering programs as they evolve.

“The advantage of working with NIST is that top people work there. They are the standards body, so they have seen and surveyed a lot of industry,” Menon says. He also lauds NIST’s high-level view of cybersecurity and its implications. “They’re not just looking at technology but also public policy, human factors, etc. It’s a holistic approach.”

Organizations interested in being an industry participant (whether they have cybersecurity-focused or business process improvement-focused projects) with PREP are encouraged to contact Brian Ngac.

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Cryptocurrency’s surprising transparency advantage

Marianne Klinker — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 18:18:45 +0000

Cryptocurrency’s surprising transparency advantage Marianne Klinker Tue, 01/02/2024 - 13:18

Despite the fears of regulators and skittish investors, clear and accurate signals of cryptocurrency quality may be hidden in plain sight.

As perhaps befits a product of the post-2008 economy, the cryptocurrency space has never known normalcy. In a mere 13 years, crypto went from an untried software innovation of mysterious origin to being touted as the future of investing by major movie stars in Super Bowl commercials. Soon thereafter, of course, came the “crypto winter” of 2022, which began well before, but was surely deepened by, the downfall of FTX and disgraced wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried.

Forthcoming in Journal of Management Information Systems, a recent paper is the first to examine whether the intensity of developer engagement with a cryptocurrency could indeed be related to its quality.

The crypto backlash appears rooted in the belief that the sector is too rife with bad actors, and too technologically complicated, to be worthy of public trust. The consensus in the crypto community, however, is that accurate clues to crypto quality are hidden in plain sight. The majority of cryptocurrencies use open source platforms such as GitHub for the development of their software. Seasoned investors will routinely inspect the publicly available development history of a cryptocurrency as a basic aspect of due diligence.

Forthcoming in Journal of Management Information Systems, a recent paper co-authored by Mariia Petryk, an assistant professor of information systems at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at George Mason �鶹��, is the first to examine whether the intensity of developer engagement with a cryptocurrency could indeed be related to its quality. (Her collaborators were Liangfei Qiu and Praveen Pathak of �鶹�� of Florida.)

Mariia Petryk

“This paper is about how we evaluate reputation in a setting where traditional reputational instruments are not precise,” Petryk explains. “When we choose a doctor, we often rely on an endorsement from someone we trust. But in lieu of that, we look into the history of the doctor—education, training, etc.” By the same token (no pun intended), crypto investors could “judge quality based on the total effort developers made to write the code.”

Using GitHub data for 559 cryptocurrencies over the period August 2016 to December 2019, the researchers zeroed in on five open-source activities. They classed three under the heading of “quality enhancement.” Commits are code modifications submitted by developers and eventually added to the crypto source code. Before official adoption, proposed modifications exist as pull requests awaiting assessment. Issues are questions, bugs, or problems raised by developers or users for discussion within the open source platform.

The remaining two activities fall under “diffusion of software,” essentially a proxy for developer attention. Forks are mirrored copies of the original code attached to a developer’s account. Watches are a way for developers to “subscribe” in order to more closely follow the discussion within the community around a cryptocurrency.

Across the data-set, the researchers found that a one-standard-deviation increase in forks and watches would equate to a 0.56% price increase per month, or 6.7% per year.

As for the three “quality enhancement” metrics, increases in issues exerted upward pressure on token price, but pull requests and commits displayed the opposite effect. A one-standard-deviation increase in issues led to a 4.3 percent higher price over one year, while an equivalent increase in pull requests was linked to annual losses of five percent.

These contradictory results perhaps point to uncertainties about the length of time it would take for crypto admins to evaluate and implement proposed changes. It goes without saying that greater numbers of requests for revision would heighten such uncertainties and their possible implications for cryptocurrency quality.

Overall, these findings imply a “virtuous circle” whereby more promising cryptocurrencies attract more developer attention, which in turn produces quality improvements that are reflected in the token price. While the expansion of the developer community creates the potential for rising pull requests and commits to lower the token price, the price-positive impact of forks and watches was approximately six times stronger. As a general rule, then, intensity of developer attention and engagement could be viewed as a leading indicator of how the market values the tokens—with the very important caveat that broad statistical patterns may have little to no bearing on specific investment decisions.

Therefore, information from GitHub and other open-source platforms could be an important reference point for policymakers looking to evolve nuanced regulatory approaches. “One purpose of regulation is to create equal opportunity,” Petryk says. “Transparent mechanisms allow investors to learn about underlying assets and properties and make their own judgments. Open source platforms like GitHub are open to everyone, but not everyone thinks to use it. In terms of info disclosure, this could be an important factor.”

More Costello College of Business Faculty Research

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Mariia Petryk

Nonprofits are in trouble. Could more sensitive chatbots be the answer?
March 18, 2025
Costello College of Business health care research puts “patients at the center”
March 11, 2025
Would you rather buy from a cuddly chatbot, or the “Lipstick King”?
March 4, 2025
George Mason professor furthers impact of telemedicine in Ukraine
January 14, 2025
Does the world need a ‘universal language’ of accounting?
January 7, 2025

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Do you criticize or celebrate your colleagues? It may depend on your social position

Marianne Klinker — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 14:49:21 +0000

Do you criticize or celebrate your colleagues? It may depend on your social position Marianne Klinker Wed, 09/27/2023 - 10:49

Online technology has made real-time performance feedback a workplace reality. But a pair of Mason professors have found out about a major bias in the system.

Online technology is fundamentally reshaping employee evaluations. In the last decade or so, companies such as IBM, Amazon, and General Electric have adopted performance feedback apps that allow employees to "review" one another in real time. These apps take the 360-degree paradigm to its logical extreme by removing temporal, hierarchical, and geographical barriers to feedback.

According to Mariia Petryk, assistant professor of information systems and operations management (ISOM) at George Mason �鶹�� School of Business, “People are trying to tap into new sources of employee engagement across all management and employment tiers. For millennials and Gen Z, instant communication is the norm, and they are not going to wait a year to get feedback. They want to know how they perform here and now, and be able to comment on other people’s performance in the same way. So when we merge these trends of social connectedness, instant communication, and use of technology, we come up with this wonderful application.”

As with any breakthrough technology, though, appropriate use of real-time performance feedback depends upon understanding its inherent limitations. After all, increasing the scale and speed of feedback is not guaranteed to erase deep-seated biases based upon gender, race, hierarchical position, etc. In a recent paper for Information Systems Research, Petryk and her ISOM colleague Siddharth Bhattacharya, concentrate on a relatively neglected—but, as it turns out, subtly powerful—category of bias related to how individuals are embedded within the informal (i.e. social) network of the organization.

Mariia Petryk (left) and Siddharth Bhattacharya

Their co-authors were Michael Rivera and Subodha Kumar of Temple �鶹��, and Liangfei Qiu of �鶹�� of Florida.

Working from a unique data-set from technology provider DevelapMe, comprising nearly 4,000 instances of real-time performance feedback spanning five organizations, the researchers mapped the informal networks of each organization. They then compared reviews submitted by employees who were positionally embedded—i.e. those who moved in influential circles, though they may not themselves have been high-ranking—to ones by those who were structurally embedded, meaning they had larger clusters of weak ties.

For millennials and Gen Z, instant communication is the norm, and they are not going to wait a year to get feedback. They want to know how they perform here and now, and be able to comment on other people’s performance in the same way.

For example, both a C-level executive and their assistant could be considered positionally embedded. A middle manager whose work touches multiple teams would be structurally embedded.

The professors found that positionally embedded employees tended to give higher scores to colleagues, while structurally embedded employees skewed negative in their ratings.

Bhattacharya says, “Informal network bias could be explained as a matter of perspective. From atop the hierarchy, it’s difficult to see how projects came together and who made what happen. Positionally embedded people have a coarse rather than a granular view. Therefore, they may give highly visible individuals more credit than they deserve for collaborative work—for example, they may wrongly assume that a team member chosen to present a project to them was primarily responsible for said project.

By contrast, structurally embedded employees have wider and more diverse networks and thus a much broader base of comparison. This makes them prone to detect and emphasize the flaws of co-workers.”

Organizations using feedback apps such as DevelapMe can usually set limits on the number of anonymous reviews they allow, although the identities of anonymous raters are always visible to HR and senior leadership. The researchers found that anonymity magnified informal network bias for both structurally embedded and positionally embedded employees.

Further, since reviews included both numerical score and explanatory text, the researchers analyzed how informal network bias influenced the wording of reviews. They saw that positionally embedded raters, though more generous with their numerical rating, were relatively neutral and formal in their written feedback. Structurally embedded reviews exhibited the opposite pattern: Comparatively strict in their scoring, but positive and encouraging in their written content. The researchers speculate this points to contrasting motives—constructive vs. motivational—the two groups had for delivering feedback.

Easy ways to counter informal network bias, then, would be for organizations to carefully consider the amount of anonymity to permit, and for them to recommend or even require that each instance of feedback be accompanied by text.

Beyond that, Bhattacharya and Petryk suggest that companies employ a combination of training and technological refinements to help address informal network bias. For example, positionally embedded managers should be reminded to temper their reviews with a bit more objectivity—perhaps peering outside their bubble to get a more complete picture of an employee’s work. Tech providers and consultants could use tools such as social network mapping to help organizations better account for informal network bias in their employee performance data.

Petryk says, “�鶹�� data and findings show the mechanisms of how people—not necessarily high-ranking people—can have power over rewards, because at the end of the day the ratings will be factored into a formal evaluation. And bonuses will be distributed on the basis of the evaluation. How that decision is being made can be greatly impacted by the data that we analyze, and that we obtain from this network.”

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