Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
2-2020
Abstract
Security negligence, a major cause of data breaches, occurs when an organization’s information technology management fails to adequately address security vulnerabilities. By conducting a field quasi-experiment using outgoing spam as a focal security issue, this study investigates the effectiveness of reputational sanctions in reducing security negligence in a global context. In the quasi-experiment, a reputational sanction mechanism based on outgoing spam was established for four countries, and for each country, reputational sanctions were imposed on the 10 organizations with the largest outgoing spam volumes—that is, these organizations were listed publicly. We find that because of our reputational sanction mechanism, organizations in the four countries, including those that were not listed, reduced outgoing spam significantly compared to those in similar countries. Within each country, the listed organizations, whose reputations were actually sanctioned, reduced spam to a greater extent than those that were not listed. The spam reduction in the not-listed organizations is mainly driven by increased security awareness, while the reduction in the listed organizations is primarily due to reputation effect. Among the listed organizations, those ranked lower were more responsive to the reputational sanctions. Moreover, we find that reputational sanctions have a stronger effect on large organizations and important organizations that provide network access and transit to others.
Keywords
Field quasi-experiment, information security, reputational sanction, spam
Discipline
Computer Sciences | Information Security
Research Areas
Information Systems and Management
Publication
Production and Operations Management
Volume
29
Issue
2
First Page
410
Last Page
427
ISSN
1059-1478
Identifier
10.1111/poms.13119
Publisher
Wiley: 24 months
Citation
TANG, Qian and WHINSTON, Andrew B..
Does reputational sanctions deter negligence in information security management? A field quasi-experiment. (2020). Production and Operations Management. 29, (2), 410-427.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4864
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1111/poms.13119