System Dynamics Modeling for Information Systems Research: Theory Development and Practical Application1
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most information systems (IS) research develops theory for explanation and prediction based on a variance logical structure that assumes one-way, time invariant causal relationships. This approach largely misses the opportunity to extend theory from alternative logical structures that build upon reciprocal and temporal causal mechanisms; for example, the system perspective. This paper introduces system dynamics (SD), a modeling tool capable of capturing the reciprocal and temporal causal mechanisms that underlie many complex and dynamic systems, and demonstrates its ability to extend existing variance theory from a system perspective. To do so, we first describe the basic tenets of SD and discuss the status quo of existing SD applications in the field. Then, we demonstrate how to model SD’s unique theoretical logic of reciprocal and temporal causal structure to extend existing variance theory. To demonstrate the use of SD in theory development, we develop and validate an SD model of the e-commerce resource endowment of a click-and-mortar firm and simulate dynamic causal relationships between the e-commerce resource endowment and firm performance over time, under various scenarios. This case demonstrates how we can extend an existing variance theory by reconciling the inconsistent findings of prior research from a system perspective using the SD approach. The paper concludes by discussing how SD can help IS researchers develop dynamic theories.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it