Sinan Aral

Assistant Professor, Microsoft Faculty Fellow

Stern School of Business, New York University

Date: March 23, 2012

Venue: Speakman Hall 200

Title: Content & Causality in Social Networks

Abstract

Many of us are interested in whether “networks matter.” Whether in the spread of disease, the diffusion of information, the propagation of social contagions, the effectiveness of viral marketing, or the magnitude of peer effects in a variety of settings, two key questions must be answered before we can understand whether networks matter: 1) how the content that flows through networks affects the patterns of outcomes we see across nodes and 2) whether the statistical relationships we observe can be interpreted causally. Sinan will review what we know and where research might go with respect to content and causality in networks. He will provide two examples from each area to structure the discussion: One from an analysis of email networks and the information content that flows through them at a mid-sized executive recruiting firm (published in the American Journal of Sociology) and the other from a randomized field experiment on a popular social networking website that tests the effectiveness of “viral product design” strategies in creating peer influence and social contagion among the 1.4 million friends of 9,687 experimental users (the first paper published in Management Science and a second paper forthcoming in Science).

Sunil Mithas

Associate Professor,

Decision, Operations and Information Technologies Department,

Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland

March 16, 2012

Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1130am

Seminar Title : Information Technology and Globalization: Theory and Evidence

Abstract

Does information technology (IT) enable firms to globalize their operations and achieve higher foreign revenues and foreign profits? Although several studies have argued that IT can help firms globalize their operations, few studies have empirically tested this conjecture. We identify and discuss three mechanisms that explain why IT investments enable firms to globalize their operations – value chain coordination, value chain configuration, and local responsiveness. Using data on 259 multinational firms for an 8-year period (1999 – 2006), we find that aggregate IT investments are positively associated with higher levels of foreign revenues and lower levels of total costs. In turn, the increase in foreign revenues and reduction in total costs mediate profits from foreign operations. IT investments also help to increase domestic revenues and domestic profits. On the whole, we find that IT contributes to globalization both through higher revenues and lower total costs.

Please email swattal@temple.edu for a copy of the paper.