Issues and Opportunities in E-Business Research: A Simonian Perspective

Abstract

The third industrial revolution, combining Internet technology with globalization, produces an increasingly complicated e-business environment. There is no wonder that skew distributions, a striking empirical regularity in the hypercompetitive digital economy, have attracted the attention of many researchers recently. Little known by many, Herbert Simon had studied similar regularities in the industrial economy and developed empirically grounded, explanatory theories to help guide strategic decision making in the evolutionary processes of organizations. In this paper, we draw upon five seemingly unrelated research areas of Simon (skew distributions, near decomposability, causal reasoning, effectual reasoning, and attention management) and propose a holistic framework of attention-based information systems for firms to frame an enduring competitive strategy in the digital economy. As an ongoing project, the framework is applied to model Netchising, an emerging research topic in global e-business.