Prashant Palvia

Dr. Prashant Palvia is Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor and Director of the McDowell Research Center in the Bryan School of Business & Economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). Dr. Palvia served as Department Head from 2000 to 2004 and Information Systems Ph.D. Director from 2003 to 2008. Prior to 27 years in academics, he had 9 years of industry experience. He received his Ph.D., MBA and MS from the University of Minnesota and BS from the University of Delhi, India. Fourteen students have received their Ph.D. under his guidance. Prof. Palvia received UNCG’s senior research excellence award in 2005. He has worked extensively in the field of Global Information Technology Management (GITM) and chairs the annual GITMA world conference, the next one being in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA in June 2011 (http://www.gitma.org). He also chaired the EMR Implementation conference at UNCG in May 2010. Professor Palvia is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Global Information Technology Management (JGITM), and is on editorial board of several journals. His research interests include global information technology management, healthcare IT, virtual teams, open source software, electronic commerce, media choice theory, and trust in exchange relationships. He has published 89 articles in journals such as the MIS Quarterly, Decision Sciences, Communications of the ACM, Communications of the AIS, Information & Management, Decision Support Systems, and ACM Transactions on Database Systems, and 165 conference articles. He has co-edited four books on Global Information Technology Management; the last one was published in May 2007.

There are 94 included publications by Prashant Palvia :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Approximating Block Accesses in Random Files: The Case of Blocking Factors Lower than One 1991 2149 Expressions available in the current literature to estimate the number of blocks accessed in a random file fail to work when the blocking factor is lower than one. A new expression is developed in this article to estimate the number of blocks accesse...
Are Mobile Devices Threatening Your Work-Life Balance? 2015 5548 Employees are constantly engaging in new technologies that allow them to connect to the work place from different locations and at different time periods. The increased ubiquity of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and in particular t...
B2C Internet Commerce: A Tale of Two Nations 2002 1705 Much of the empirical information on E-Commerce activity is based on the U.S. and other developed nations. This study extends our knowledge by conducting a comparative investigation of B2C Internet shopping in the U.S. and Thailand. A unique featur...
Batched Searching in Database Organizations 1988 1891 Savings in the number of page accesses due to batching on sequential, tree-structured, and random files are well known and have been reported in the literature. This paper asserts that substantial savings can also be obtained in database organization...
Building a Model of Technology Preference: The Case of Channel Choices 2011 2088 Intention theories, such as the Theory of Reasoned Action, the Theory of Planned Behavior, and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), have been widely adopted to explain information system usage. These theories, however, do not explicitly consider th...
Business Practices on the World Wide Web: A Comparison of Japanese and U.S. Web Sites 2001 628 Rapid developments in the area of telecommunications and information technologies have brought about dramatic changes in the way organizations conduct business and have influenced the way organizations seek to gain competitive advantages in their ind...
Capability, Quality and Performance of Offshore IS Vendors: A Theoretical Framework and Empirical Investigation. 2010 3397 Information systems (IS) offshoring has become a widespread practice and a strategic sourcing choice for many firms. While much has been written by researchers about the factors that lead to successful offshoring arrangements from the client's viewpo...
Chinese institutions and standardization: The case of government support to domestic third generation cellular standard 2011 3573 There are unique and distinct institutional processes associated with the Chinese government's support of the domestically developed third generation (3G) cellular standard, TD-SCDMA. After postponing several times, China awarded three third generati...
Competition matters! Self-efficacy, effort, and performance in crowdsourcing teams 2019 987 Advances in information technologies (IT) have enabled organizations to seek solutions for their business problems from beyond their own workforce through digital crowdsourcing platforms. In the most common form of crowdsourcing, teams that offer sol...
The complexity of richness: Media, message, and communication outcomes 2008 11811 Dynamic web-based multimedia communication has been increasingly used in organizations, necessitating a better understanding of how it affects their outcomes. We investigated factor structures and relationships involving media and information richnes...
Contextual Constraints in Media Choice: Beyond Information Richness 2011 4817 In today's dynamic environment, managers and organizations are faced with varied choices in communicating information for enhanced decision making. In business, the selection of the appropriate media needs to be efficient and effective for decision m...
Control-Related Motivations and Information Security Policy Compliance: The Role of Autonomy and Efficacy 2013 947 Employees' failures to follow information security policy can be costly to organizations, causing organizations to implement security controls to motivate secure behavior. Information security research has explored many control-related motivations (e...
Critical Information Technology Issues in Turkish Healthcare 2014 2475 While the importance of information technology in reducing soaring healthcare costs and enhancing service quality is increasingly being recognized, significant challenges remain in how it is implemented. Although there are a few studies investigating...
Critical Issues in EHR Implementation: Provider and Vendor Perspectives 2015 2209 Stakeholders, both internal and external, can have differing and sometimes conflicting perspectives and priorities even though each has a vested interest in organizational success. Using the lens of stakeholder theory, we examine the differing views ...
Critical Issues of IT Outsourcing Vendors in India 2011 1405 Global outsourcing of IT and IT-enabled services (ITES) has now become an accepted corporate strategy of a vast majority of firms around the world. The functions being offshored have increased in scope and magnitude and have climbed the value chain l...
Determinants of computing in very small businesses 1994 3972 This article focuses on computing in very small businesses (VSB). We have defined a business to be very small if it has less than 50 employees. They have been ignored in the mainstream MIS literature. However, given that small businesses constitute a...
Determinants of job satisfaction and turnover intention of IT professionals in Japan 2019 1258 This study investigates the IT workplace in Japan in the context of rapidly changing technological innovation and a long-standing collectivist culture in Japanese firms. Particularly, it examines a) the determinants of job satisfaction, such as self-...
Developing and Validating an Instrument for Measuring User-Perceived Web Quality 2002 7535 Many of the instruments to measure information and system quality were developed in the context of mainframe and PC-based technologies of yesteryears. With the proliferation of the Internet and World Wide Web applications, users are increasingly inte...
Developing a model of the global and strategic impact of information technology 1997 4017 In today's intensely competitive world, many firms have developed applications of information technology (IT) that provide a significant global competitive advantage. Most evidence of such IT use is anecdotal; the global competitive impact of IT has ...
A dialectic view of information systems outsourcing: Pros and cons 1995 8494 In recent years, information systems (IS) outsourcing is increasing in business organizations as a way to govern their IS operations. Burgeoning IS costs, lack of IS organization's responsiveness to users, and a renewed emphasis on return on IS inves...
EDI in Strategic Supply Chain: Impact on Customer Service 2001 9887 Many inter-organizational systems are increasingly using electronic data interchange (EDI) to support the strategic supply chain by way of delivering and processing business documents. In a vendor–customer relationship, EDI can provide many benefits ...
Editorial Preface The World IT Project: A Program on International Research and Call for Participation 2013 775 Much of the research in information systems and information technology (IS/IT) has been dominated by a U.S-centric or a Western-centric view. Research paradigms and models developed for the U.S. and Western Europe are just that; they are applicable p...
Editorial Preface: Global Information Technology Management Research: A Reality Check 2001 469 This is the fourth year of operation of the Journal of Global Information Technology Management (JGITM). While it has been a lot of hard work on part of a lot of people, it is gratifying to note that the journal is firmly rooted and respected in the ...
Editorial: A Brief Retrospective (2013-2019) 2019 415 In this editorial, we wish to offer: (1) some reflections on my experience as EIC—initially and as I got involved in the role, as well as after I retired from the role; (2) an overview of what JAIS published in the six years of my term—the credit for...
The Effect of Buffer Size on Pages Accessed in Random Files 1988 1917 Prior works, for estimating the number of pages (blocks) accessed from secondary memory to retrieve a certain number of records for a query, have ignored the effect of main memory buffer size. While this may not cause any adverse impact for special c...
The Effectiveness of Using Computers for Software Training: An Exploratory Study 2007 1600 Both academic institutions and corporations have invested huge amounts of resources in computer-based training and education. The evidence in support of the effectiveness of computers and instructional technology in the classroom is mixed at best. ...
Effects of occupational culture of IT professionals on job satisfaction in Japan 2018 248 Information technology (IT) professionals develop and maintain quality information systems (IS). As capable IT professionals are scant resource, many organizations work hard to attract and retain them within the organization. Therefore, maintain and ...
Electronic Medical Records Application Development: Perspectives of the Service Provider 2013 1714 Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) is a relatively new phenomenon and refers to the use of computer applications to store, process, and use clinical, administrative, and financial information among various health care entities. HIT is widely reg...
An Empirical Evaluation of System Development Methodologies 1990 5425 Many methodologies and techniques may be used in the development of information systems. Two widely used methodologies are: system development life cycle, and proto-typing. In this article, we have extensively evaluated the two methodologies based on...
ERP Implementation Issues in Advanced and Developing Countries 2001 20155 There is an increasing need to implement a total business solution which supports major functionalities of a business. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is designed to meet this need, and has been widely adopted by organizations in develope...
ERP Selection at Custom Fabrics: A Teaching Case 2002 608 As firms try to replace outdated legacy systems and modernize their information systems, they seriously consider implementing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages. However, the firm selecting an ERP vendor is faced with several difficult issue...
Examination of Infomediary Roles in B2C E-Commerce 2007 2794 This article provides a parsimonious research model that assists in the study of infomediary roles in B2C E-Commerce, their level of integration and sophistication, and their impact on infomediary performance and customers’ satisfaction. After an e...
An Examination of the IT Satisfaction of Small-Business Users 1999 4916 Although there are many articles in the NIS literature which address small-business computing, in effect the organizations represented in these studies are, in many ways, similar to medium- and large-sized organizations. In this article, we focus on ...
Exploring the effects of direct experience on IT use: An organizational field study 2008 2973 Empirical studies have investigated the effect of attitude and behavior on IT acceptance in organizations but yielded ambiguous results. Possibly they have not effectively accounted for the moderating effects of experience gained through direct inter...
Exploring job satisfaction of IT workers in Taiwan, Japan, and China: The role of employee demographics, Job Demographics, and Uncertainty Avoidance 2018 702 The purpose of this study is to explore the drivers of job satisfaction among IT workers in the East Asian context, particularly in Taiwan, Japan, and China. Using data collected from IT workers, decision tree analysis was employed to identify the pr...
Expressions for Batched Searching of Sequential and Hierarchical Files 1985 2838 Batching yields significant savings in access costs in sequential, tree-structured, and random files. A direct and simple expression is developed for computing the average number of records/pages accessed to satisfy a batched query of a sequential fi...
Factors Affecting the Success of Open Source Software 2012 12106 With the rapid rise in the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in all types of applications, it is important to know which factors can lead to OSS success. OSS projects evolve and transform over time; therefore success must be examined longitudinally o...
The Feasibility Study in Information Systems: an Analysis of Criteria and Contents 1988 92962 The feasibility study has been prescribed and described as an important step in information system development. Yet there has been little research on issues pertaining to its con-tents and criteria. This paper addresses these issues and reports resea...
A field examination of system life cycle techniques and methodologies 1993 3989 There is a myriad of system development methodologies, techniques, and tools that have been developed ever since businesses started using computers for information processing. However, there is no real consensus on the aptness or applicability of the...
A Framework for the Impact of IT on Organizational Performance 2011 10194 Purpose – Despite the constant stream of research investigating information technology (IT) business value, IT capabilities, and competitive advantage, researchers are calling for a more coherent understanding of the firm-level impacts of IT, and how...
Global Information Architectures: Alternatives and Tradeoffs 1993 3698 The alignment of information architectures with business strategies is important for organizations in order to achieve global pre-eminence. Past architectures have been limited in that they consider only technical and computer-based aspects of inform...
Global Information Technology: A Meta Analysis of Key Issues 2002 4656 Recently, there has been an increasing number of studies and articles that have identified and ranked global information technology (IT) issues in various parts of the world. The objective of this article is to aggregate the results of these studies ...
Global IT Outsourcing Management: Key Influence Factors and Strategies 2002 3487 The key focus of this article is to provide an understanding about the complexities involved in global IT outsourcing and the management initiatives needed for the successful implementation of a global IT outsourcing partnership. Technological advanc...
Heuristic Optimization of Physical Data Bases: Using a Generic and Abstract Design Model 1988 3959 Designing efficient physical data bases is a complex activity, involving the consideration of a large number of factors. Mathematical programming-based optimization models for physical design make many simplifying assumptions; thus, their applicabili...
ICT for socio-economic development: A citizens’ perspective 2018 5086 There is a widespread belief that information and communication technologies (ICTs) can play a significant role in the socio-economic development of a developing country. ICT has the potential to affect many aspects of economic and societal activitie...
ICT Policies in Developing Countries: An Evaluation with the Extended Design-Actuality Gaps Framework 2015 2764 Information and communication technologies (ICT) are often represented as a factor in global economic growth and social development. Consequently, countries and governments invest large amounts of resources in the ICT sector. However, it is not certa...
An Ideology of IT Occupational Culture: The ASPIRE Values 2018 1300 Many have conjectured that people in the IT occupation are different from non-IT business users and that such differences can lead to negative organizational outcomes. This study investigates how to measure these differences by developing a new, expa...
The Impact of Data Models and Task Complexity on End User Performance: An Experimental Investigation 2000 1762 The purpose of this study was to investigate similarities and differences in the quality of data representations produced by end-users using the relational model (RM), the extended entity-relationship model (EERM), and the object-oriented model (OOM)...
Improving Open Source Software Maintenance 2010 1801 Maintenance is inevitable for almost any software. Software maintenance is required to fix bugs, to add new features, to improve performance, and/or to adapt to a changed environment. In this article, we examine change in cognitive complexity and ...
Information and communications technologies as an enabler of supply chain integration 2018 631 This study is a meta-research analysis that examined the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as an enabler of supply chain integration. Our analysis covered 55 papers in 34 journals published between 2007 and 2017. RFID systems ...
Information requirements of a global EIS: An exploratory macro assessment 1996 2538 Rapid changes in the world economy and politics have accelerated the drive of businesses into international expansion. Information technology (IT) has made an important contribution in both the facilitation and the driving of a global business. As a ...
Information Systems Education and Research: Are We Leaders or Laggards 1997 1333 Every discipline should periodically indulge in self-introspection to assess its value to the various stakeholders. In this writing, I exhort the MIS academic community to examine the value of the education and research that it provides to its variou...
Information Systems Management Issues: Reporting and Relevance 1999 2915 Reports of key information systems issues have been published over the last two decades in many journals. Leading IS journals (e.g., MIS Quarterly, Information & Management, among others) have published key IS management issue reports every three or ...
Information Technology Adoption Behavior Life Cycle: Toward a Technology Continuance Theory (TCT). 2009 13562 For over a decade, researchers have devoted much effort to construct theoretical models, such as the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Expectation Confirmation Model (ECM) for explaining and predicting user behavior in IS acceptance and conti...
Information technology issues in healthcare: Hospital CEO and CIO perspectives. 2012 10699 Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) is widely regarded as a key to improving the quality of healthcare in the United States and potentially reducing its cost. Yet, its implementation is a continuous challenge for the healthcare industry. In thi...
Information Technology (IT) enabled crowdsourcing: A conceptual framework 2020 904 IT-enabled crowdsourcing is defined as technology-enabled outsourcing of tasks through an open call to the masses via the internet. Crowdsourcing is an IT artifact that has gone beyond the traditional boundaries of an organization to a much broader c...
An Interactive DSS Tool for Physical Database Design 1991 2524 The design of efficient physical databases is a complex activity involving the consideration of a large number of factors. Because of the complexity, mathematical programming approaches seeking to optimize the physical database have to make many simp...
Journal Self-Citation IV: Citations Analysis of IS Journals – Separating Facts from Fiction 2009 1217 This article is inspired by a recent posting on the AISWorld listserv eliciting thoughts on the practice of self-citations by journals in the IS field. While emotions ran high in the ensuing online discussion, we try to provide an objective and infor...
Key Data Management Issues in a Global Executive Information System 2001 4894 Information technology plays a significant role in a global organization. Senior executives of these organizations need constant and timely access to global information for making decisions. This information originates in different places worldwide f...
Key Information Systems Issues: An Analysis of MIS Publications 1996 8493 Reports of key MIS issues based on the perceptions of senior IS executives appear periodically in the MIS literature. In this article, we provide another perspective on key MIS issues by examining published MIS articles. A content analysis of MIS art...
Management Information Systems Research: What’s There in a Methodology? 2003 4465 Management information systems (MIS) is both a young and unique field, constantly experiencing rapid change and turmoil. Consequently, MIS research faces dual changes of rigor and relevance. Many research methodologies exist that provide various comb...
Measuring the Impact of Global Information Technology Applications 2005 4852 The objective of this study is to develop a means of assessing the impact of global information technology applications. Building on the prior work of Pal via (1997), Sethi and King (1994) and Mahmood and Soon (1991) a multi-factor global IT impact m...
Measuring value dimensions of IT occupational culture: an exploratory analysis 2014 1967 Culture in information systems (IS) research has been an important area of study for over twenty-five years but has focused on two levels of analysis: national and organizational. However, research at the level of IT occupational culture has been min...
Methodological and Topic Trends in Information Systems Research: A Meta-Analysis of IS Journals 2015 3024 In this paper, we present trends in IS research during a 10-year period (2004 to 2013). Much like its predecessor, Palvia et al. (2004), we provide a long-overdue update. We reviewed all papers from seven major IS journals and coded them based on top...
Mobile Commerce Adoption in China and the United States: A Cross-Cultural Study 2009 15714 Mobile communication technologies have penetrated consumer markets throughout the world. Mobile commerce is likely to make a strong influence on business activities, consumer behavior, as well as national and global markets. Thus the identificati...
A Model and Instrument for Measuring Small Business User Satisfaction with Information Technology 1996 6603 Measurement of the value of computing in very small businesses has been largely ignored in the MIS literature. This article develops a comprehensive model for examining the satisfaction of small business users with information technology (SBUSIT). It...
Models and Requirements for Using Strategic Information Systems in Developing Nations 1990 11161 Strategic information systems (SIS) are a reality in the United States and other advanced nations. They are being developed and used in many organizations to provide them with a competitive advantage. We contend that such systems would have significa...
Objectivity in MIS Research 1995 1108 I wish to bring up two issues that seem to hamper objectivity in MIS research. I will call them "Strike it when it is hot" issue and "Elephant and the blind men" issue.
On the Computability of Agent-Based Workflows 2006 1638 Workflow research is commonly concerned with optimization, modeling, and dependency. In this research, we however address a more fundamental issue. By modeling humans and machines as agents and making use of a theoretical computer and statecharts, we...
On end-user computing productivity Results of controlled experiments 1991 1822 Two important classes of end-users are: command level users, and end-user programmers. For each of these classes, controlled experiments have been conducted to measure their productivity. For command level users working with databases, our results in...
The ORION Project: Staged Business Process Reengineering at FedEx 1996 6362 Technical innovation, process reengineering, and organizational adaptation of the ORION project are described.
A Profile of Information Systems Research Published in Information & Management 2007 5787 Information & Management (I&M) has been consistently regarded as one of the top academic journals in information systems (IS). In a spirit of introspection, this article profiles research published in I&M: we identified the most productive authors an...
Reexamining Technology Acceptance in Online Task Behaviors 2006 2184 With rapid advances in information technology, information systems and software have become more versatile and multifunctional. However, users may have varying degrees of preferences to different functions and tasks that can be accomplished using a s...
A Research Framework for Information Systems Security 2006 3595 Securing the IT infrastructure and the data it contains is one of the most critical components of IT that management faces today. Technologies such as the Internet and the wide-spread dissemination of computers to more users has increased the vulnera...
Research Issues in Global Information Technology Management 1998 8258 Information technology (IT) is rapidly becoming an essential requirement for the conduct of international business. In many cases, IT is a driving force as evinced by its role in business expansion and competitive advantage in worldwide markets. Anec...
Research Methodologies In MIS: An Update 2004 2817 This article presents trends in published MIS research for an 11 year period, 1993-2003. It is an update of a previous article in CAIS (Volume 11, Article 16) that covered the period 1993-1997. All of the articles in seven mainstream MIS journals wer...
Research Models in Information Systems 2008 1914 The use of research models in driving scholarly investigation is of great importance in any field, including information systems (IS). As such, a taxonomy of IS research models should be of substantial value to the discipline. Such a taxonomy is deve...
The role of job satisfaction in turnover and turn-away intention of IT staff in South Africa 2019 1400 Aim/Purpose: This study forms part of the World IT Project, which aims to gain a deeper understanding of individual, personal and organisational factors influencing IT staff in a modern, work environment. The project also aims to provide a global vie...
The role of trust in e-commerce relational exchange: A unified model 2009 16876 Recently, studies of B2C e-commerce have used intention theory to understand the role of trust of Internet transactions but most have investigated only a component of e-commerce (e.g., initial adoption or continuance) and neglected the role of good r...
The Roles of Habit and Web Site Quality in E-Commerce 2006 11446 Previous research has primarily examined consumers’ perceived usefulness of web sites and trust in the web retailer as two major predictors of web site use and e-commerce adoption. While the consumers’ repeated behavior in the past (i.e., habit) may ...
Sensitivity of the Physical Database Design to Changes in Underlying Factors 1988 3075 Several articles have reported on the optimization of the complete physical database design or significant parts of it. However, few results are available on the sensitivity of the physical database design to change in underlying factors that influen...
Should I stay or should I go? A study of IT professionals during a national crisis 2019 249 Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss two important behaviors related to job mobility in the IT profession, namely, changing jobs to move to another organization (turnover) and changing the profession entirely (turnaway), during a national...
The Social Influence Model of Technology Adoption 2010 17211 Human innovation, in combination with the internet, networking, and communications technologies have produced a new platform for social and business networking, formation of community, and communication. This emerging phenomenon is generally known as...
Stage Antecedents of Consumer Online Buying Behavior 2010 2246 Unlike previous research which adopts simultaneous measures to examine customers’ satisfaction with the entire online shopping experience, this study examines two important stages of online buying behavior: ordering and fulfillment. The explicit cons...
Strategies for global information systems development 2004 27018 Developing global information systems is a formidable task. Multinational companies operate in regions that are thousands of miles, many time zones, and many cultures away from headquarters. Organizing the activities and aligning the tasks and mindse...
Testing an Extended Model of IT Acceptance in the Chinese Cultural Context 2006 4951 Research on technology acceptance and diffusion is critical, providing insights into how organizations can manage the adoption and use of information technology. With globalization, it is important to understand IT adoption in other cultures. The pri...
Timing Strategies for Feasibility Studies in Information Systems Development 1990 8789 The feasibility study has been prescribed and described as an important step in information system development. One of the key issues pertaining to the feasibility study is. its time of preparation and presentation during the system development life ...
Towards an Understanding of Cloud Computing’s Impact on Organizational IT Strategy 2014 5272 Cloud computing has become a dominant IT trend during the past two years for its potential to remarkably change the technology and the business landscape. Although a lot have been discussed regarding its benefits and risks, and cloud strategy itself ...
Trekking the globe with the World IT Project 2018 864 It is widely acknowledged that information systems/information technology (IS/IT) academic research is mostly Western centric (i.e., U.S. and Western Europe based). Several surveys have clearly pointed out that most of the publications are based in t...
Trust and knowledge sharing in diverse global virtual teams 2013 7266 Global virtual teams (GVTs) allow organizations to improve productivity, procure global knowledge, and transfer best practice information instantaneously among team members. GVTs rely heavily on IT and have little face-to-face interaction, thereby in...
Trust in E-Commerce. 2005 4063 Web-based businesses succeed by cultivating consumers’ trust, starting with their beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and willingness to perform transactions at Web sites and with the organizations behind them.
U.S. Healthcare Provider Capabilities and Performance: the Mediating Roles of Service Innovation and Quality 2020 1435 Rapid advancements in information and communication technologies (ICT) combined with improvements in socioeconomic standards of living have led to an increase in consumers’ demands for personal services in a variety of industries including healthcare...
Understanding the Adoption of Web-Enabled Transaction Processing By Small Businesses 2007 2609 The promise of the Internet and e-commerce has led to the increasing use of the web for transaction processing. Many organizations have adopted web-enabled transaction processing for applications such as processing payments online, selling products o...
Unraveling implicit knowledge in information technology jobs 2019 403 Job seekers are used to looking at job postings published on the main websites like Glassdoor and Google Jobs. Typically, an online job posting provides a piece of text that describes the job in a more qualitative way. Most job seekers, who would hav...