There is often tremendous hype accompanying the launch of new information technology (IT) products, which can inflate the value of new IT. We examine this from an information-theoretic standpoint where complexity and uncertainty in the information available to the decision-maker investing in new IT results in inflated expectations about that IT. We have developed the survey instrument for this study. A small pilot to assess the content validity of the instrument was done with 17 firms in South Dakota and Minnesota participating in the survey. The next stage will be to use this instrument to test our value distortion model.
