A Simonian Approach to E-Business Research: A Study in Netchising

Abstract

The third industrial revolution, combining Internet technology with globalization, produces an increasingly complicated e-business environment. It is no wonder that skew distributions, a striking empirical regularity in the hypercompetitive digital economy, have attracted the attention of many researchers recently. 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 area little-known to many. In this chapter, we draw upon five seemingly unrelated research areas of Simon (skew distributions, near decomposability, docility, causal and 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.