E-business and management science: mutual impacts (Part 1 of 2)

This begins a two-part commentary on management science and e-business, the theme of this two-part special issue. After explaining the topical clusters that give organization to both parts, we pose two key questions concerning the impact of the emerging digital economy on management science research: What fundamentally new research questions arise, and what kind of research enables progress on them? We sketch the papers appearing in this part from the perspective of both these questions, and offer summary comments on the first question based on the papers in both parts. The principal conclusion is that the digital economy is giving birth to new research questions in three main ways (not all independent): by enabling and popularizing several types of technology-mediated interactions, by spawning large-scale digital data sources, and by creating recurring operational decisions that need to be automated.