08/15/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 08/15/2025 09:56
Katia Guerra, assistant professor of information technology management, has recently published two significant studies addressing timely and critical topics in management information systems: privacy in smart healthcare applications and cognitive bias in survey design.
In her article, "A Privacy Perspective in Adopting Smart Contract Applications for Healthcare" published in the Journal of Computer Information Systems, Guerra explores how privacy concerns impact the adoption of smart contract technologies in healthcare settings. Using a privacy calculus model that integrates technical, legal and social factors, the study focuses on two applications: immune certification smart contracts during health crises and electronic health record smart contracts in non-crisis contacts. Her research reveals how users evaluate privacy differently depending on the scenarios, offering important insights for both academic researchers and healthcare technology practitioners.
In her second publication, "Testing the List Order Response Effect Among Respondents with Cognitive Sophistication: Experimental Evidence in Management Information Systems Research" published in the Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods, Guerra investigates how even highly educated respondents are still vulnerable to list order bias in surveys. Drawing from satisficing theory, her study shows that these respondents tend to favor the first listed options in long answer sets, particularly when those lists are in reverse-alphabetical order. The paper proposes actionable remedies for researchers, such as shortening response lists or alternating the list order across samples, to improve data quality in management information systems research.