This study builds on prior research that examines the IT-coordination costs and firm size relationships using the transaction cost economics perspective. Specifically, this study aims to answer the following research question: Does firm’s industry type—information product industries (IPI) versus physical product industries (PPI) moderately affects the relationships between IT spending, coordination costs, and firm size? To address this research question, this study uses firm-level data from the Information Week and Compustat dataset in the United States, from 2011 to 2013. Further, this study employs the PLS-multigroup analysis (MGA) for both IPI and PPI firms. The overall PLS-MGA path analysis results show that there is a significant difference on the IT impact between the IPI and PPI firms. Indeed, firms in IPI and PPI can utilize the presence of IT pertaining to different information and physical processing activities at large.

Career anchors represent personal desires of employees that must be satisfied in order for organizations to attract and retain good workers. Career stages represent advancements along the paths of employment that an individual can take through an organization or chain of organizations that represent professional growth and increased value to an organization. Though research is prevalent on career anchors and career stage models, works that look at changes in one as the other changes are missing from the literature. Due to that lack, it is usually concluded that anchors reflect changes in careers as Information systems (IS) employees advance through their career stages. However, expectancy-value theory leads us to expect that the causality may be reversed, that career anchors change leading employees to value alternative positions more highly. Drawing on the career changes of 10 IS employees, we examine the changes in anchors through progressive career stages. While technical competence and security anchors are important at all stages of an IS career, managerial competence, geographic security, and autonomy become more important in the latter stages and are often adjusted prior to career movement. Management should account for these changes while designing jobs and incentives, while further research is required to confirm dominant patterns of change.

Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) dependency has been widely studied but research results suggest inconclusive antecedent causes. This study proposes and empirically tests three predictive models of MMOG dependency using a survey of online gaming participants. It finds multimedia realism for social interaction serves as an original antecedent factor affecting other mediating factors to cause MMOG dependency. These mediating factors derive from Uses and Gratifications theory and include: (1) participation in a virtual community, (2) diversion from everyday life, and (3) a pleasant aesthetic experience. Of these, participation in a virtual community has a strong positive relationship with MMOG dependency, and aesthetics has a modest negative relationship. Moderator analyses suggest neither gender nor “frequency of game playing” are significant but experience playing online games is a significant moderating factor of MMOG dependency.