This paper investigates the antecedents and the behavior of Lead Users in the Microsoft brand community (MBC). Lead users in the MBC are called Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVP). The group of MVPs is highly regarded as a very valuable resource within the Microsoft brand community, and their opinion strongly influences innovations in the MBC. MVP activities are center within the Micros...

Motivated by a desire to extend the Social Influence Model of Technology Use, this paper empirically examines the impact of normative social influence on group media preference patterns and group meeting outcomes in a setting where established groups voluntarily used various communication media over a three-month software development project period. The overall results suggest that conformity t...

American college students’ and children’s scores on two measures of the need for social approval closely follow changes in the state of the larger society, decreasing signiWcantly from 1958 to 1980 and leveling oV between 1980 and 2001 (total nD 36,004 across 203 samples of college students responding to the Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability scale; total nD 4741 across 38 samples of children r...

Global health research is essentially a normative undertaking: we use it to propose policies that ought to be implemented. To arrive at a normative conclusion in a logical way requires at least one normative premise, one that cannot be derived from empirical evidence alone. But there is no widely accepted normative premise for global health, and the actors with the power to set policies may use...

This paper proposes a framework based on Defeasible Logic (DL) to reason about normative modifications. We show how to express them in DL and how the logic deals with conflicts between temporalised normative modifications. Some comments will be given with regard to the phenomenon of retroactivity.