Weekly Briefs
Week 11_Bloom et al (2014)_Xue Guo
The distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology
This paper studies the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on worker and plant manger autonomy and span of control. Different from prior literature, which treats ICT as an aggregate capital stock, this paper examines the differential impacts on the organization of firms for two types of technologies—information technology (IT) and communication Technology (CI).
The paper proposes that IT is associated with decentralized decision making and CT is associated with centralized decision making. Based on the cognitive view of hierarchy, information technologies increase the availability of information and improve the workers’ ability to solve design and production problems, which lead to higher autonomy. On the contrary, technologies that reduce the cost of with-in firm communication will pass decisions to the center of the firm.
Empirically, the paper utilizes a new international plant-level data set with directly measured indicators of organization and technologies. The results shown that information technologies (ERP and CAD/CAM) are associated with greater plant manager autonomy, worker autonomy and span of control. However, the communication technology such as intranets is associated with lower plant manager autonomy. In extension, the paper also adds two instrumental variables—distance from the place of origin of the market leading ERP system and the differential regulation of the telecommunication industry across countries. And the results still hold after the robustness check.
This paper presents contradict results from prior studies. It provides theoretical and empirical evidence that organization structure of decision making are depending on different type of technology.
Week11_Pierce(2015)_Ada
Cleaning House: The Impact of Information Technology Monitoring on Employee Theft and Productivity
Motivation:
Employee theft and fraud are widespread problems in firms. A growing empirical literature on forensic economics has clarified when and how theft and other misconduct occur, but says little about the overall impact of firms’ use of forensics to monitor and reduce theft. This is a critical shortfall in the literature, given the substantial investments made by firms in monitoring employees, as well as the growing forensic and monitoring capabilities enabled by information technology (IT) systems.
Data and Method:
In this paper they use a unique dataset that details employee-level theft and sales transactions at 392 restaurants in 38 American states. They also have data for the IT monitoring system rolled out in a temporally staggered way across multiple locations. The uniqueness of this dataset enables the authors to employ DiD approach to estimate the causal effect of information technology on theft monitoring.
Main Findings:
They find significant treatment effects in reduced theft and improved productivity that appear to be driven by changing the behavior of individual workers rather than selection effects. Their results suggest that employee misconduct is primarily a result of managerial policies rather than individual differences in ethics or morality, and that policies that reduce misconduct can benefit both firms and employees.
Week 11_Bloom et al. (2014)_ Aaron
The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization
Bloom et al. (2014) studied the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on worker and plant manager autonomy and span of control. By questioning “how can the same technology (ICT) that emasculates one job empower another”, the authors argued that these technologies have two distinct components, information technology (IT) and communication technology (CT), which affect firm organization differently.
Specifically, drawing on the theories of “management by exception”, they postulate that IT and CT affect differently the hierarchical level at which different decisions are taken. Improvements in IT push decisions “down”, leading to decentralized decision making, whereas improvements in CT push decisions “up”, leading to centralized decision making.
Using a data set of U.S. and E.U manufacturing firms, they found that IT (ERP for plant managers and computer-assisted design/manufacturing for production workers) is associated with more autonomy and a wider span of control, whereas CI decrease autonomy for workers and plant managers. Moreover, they discussed the economic significance of their statistically significant results. Also, endogeneity bias was mitigated by using instrumental variables (distance from ERP’s place of origin and heterogeneous telecommunication costs arising from regulation). Last, alternative theoretical channels (coordination, agency and incentives, and automation explanation) were discussed.
Week 11_Tambe and Hitt (2014)_Jung Kwan Kim
Tambe and Hitt (2014) examine the IT spillovers by labor mobility by drilling down its impact on IT productivity with various robustness checks. More specifically, the authors aim to understand the positive relationship between the flow of technological know-how by employee mobility and the IT-backed performance.
The one and only hypothesis is: “The IT investments of other firms generate productivity spillovers through IT labor flows among firms.” The rationales are rather straightforward. First, new employees bring previously accumulated knowledge from other firms to a hiring firm. Especially, since the hands-on experience on new technology is an effective channel for knowledge dissemination, the newly hired workers from other firms with high IT intensity are particularly valuable. Thus, an abundant pool of IT labor naturally leads to better productivity spillovers for firms which accept new hires from the labor pool.
Based on an extensive set of empirical analyses, the authors support that IT labor flows explain a significant chunk of variation in IT returns, roughly 20% of the elasticity on IT investment. This finding is turned out to consistent with controlling the wage for IT workers, the unobserved demand and productivity, the geographic proximity, and the influx of labor from prominent IT firms. The empirical supports collectively imply that the influx of labor forces from IT-intensive firms is important in a managerial perspective and that securing labor flexibility is a critical responsibility of policy makers.
All in all, labor mobility matters for performance in IT.
Week 9_IT and Administrative Efficiency_Xinyu
Information Technology and Administrative Efficiency in U.S. State Governments: A Stochastic Frontier Approach
Unlike in for-profit business, where the value of IT has been studied by a large body of literature, in public sector, whether IT makes contribution to government performance is unknown. Therefore, this paper examines the relationship between IT spending and government performance. However, due to the different nature of firm and government, the performance measurements widely used in prior literature based on production function become invalid in the context of government. So this paper specifically investigates whether IT investment is associated with cost efficiency of state governments.
To measure the dependent variable, cost efficiency, the paper employs a stochastic frontier analysis with cost function. This method derives a cost frontier, which describes a minimum level of inputs, given certain amounts of outputs. After that, the cost efficiency is regressed respectively on two IT spending measurements with a two-year lag in a fixed-effect regression model, along with multiple control variables. Furthermore, the paper tests three moderators on the efficiency returns to IT spending. Those three moderators represent contextual effects from economic aspect, demographic aspect, and political aspect.
The results indicate IT spending is positively and significantly associated with government cost efficiency. This main conclusion is consistent through robustness checks. The paper mentions that, numerically, one dollar IT spending will lead to 1.13 dollar cost saving, on average. In addition, three moderating effects are all verified, indicating that the efficiency return to IT spending will be impacted by some environmental factors.
Political and IT
The authors theorize that the national politics significantly affects IT investments in the federal government we discuss how the U.S. Congress influences federal IT investments. They hypothesize that a federal agency’s capacity-building IT investments are associated with (i) legislative approval for the chief executive, (ii) government dividedness, and (iii) the agency’s ideological characteristic. They adopt a panel dataset from 135 federal agencies and bureaus in 2003-2016, the empirical analyses support all the hypotheses. It is demonstrated that the national politics has a significant impact on their IT investment profiles. A federal agency is more likely to make capacity-building IT investments when its chief executive is blessed with legislative approval, when the federal government is more united, and when it is ideologically more moderate They suggest in order to make more capacity-building IT investments, a federal agency needs more policy directives, greater political support and legitimacy, and sufficient resource endowment from Congress.
However, they did not analysis the effectiveness of IT investment or any other outcome variables of IT investment in the study.
we discuss how the U.S. Congress influences federal IT investments. They hypothesize that a federal agency’s capacity-building IT investments are associated with (i) legislative approval for the chief executive, (ii) government dividedness, and (iii) the agency’s ideological characteristic. They a panel dataset from 135 federal agencies and bureaus in 2003-2016, the empirical analyses support all the hypotheses. It is demonstrated that the national politics has a significant impact on their IT investment profiles. A federal agency is more likely to make capacity-building IT investments when its chief executive is blessed with legislative approval, when the federal government is more united, and when it is ideologically more moderate They suggest in order to make more capacity-building IT investments, a federal agency needs more policy directives, greater political support and legitimacy, and sufficient resource endowment from Congress.
Week 9_IT Governance and Business Value_Vicky Xu
IT governance and business value in the public sector organizations –The role of elected representatives in IT governance and its impact on IT value in U.S. state governments
Pang (2014) examines the moderating effect of IT governance on the relationship between IT spending and performance, measured by cost efficiency, in U.S. state governments. Different from prior studies, Pang (2014) studies the impact of IT governance on performance in the public sector, which is the new setting in IT governance research, meanwhile Pang (2014) focuses on the principal side of IT governance effect of legislative controls on IT management and investments.
Pang (2014) presents the following hypotheses:
H1: All others being equal, the association between IT spending and cost efficiency is stronger in states whose legislature has an IT-related legislative committee than in ones without such a committee.
H2: All others being equal, the association between IT spending and cost efficiency is stronger in states whose CIO position is established by legislation than otherwise.
H3: All others being equal, the association between IT spending and cost efficiency is stronger in states whose legislature approves a state CIO nominee than otherwise.
Pang (2014) adopts two-stage estimation approach in this study. First, cost efficiency of each state-year observation estimated by a stochastic frontier model. Second, the estimated cost efficiency regressed on IT spending and governance measures and control variables.
There are several findings in this study: (1). The empirical analysis results show that IT spending in U.S. state governments has positive effects on cost efficiency in state governments. (2). Supervision of state legislatures on IT management and approval of a CIO appointee complement each other. The main contributions include: First, this research contributes to the literature on IT business value and IT governance. Second, a new finding presented to the IS literature that the involvement of principals in IT management helps organizations utilize IT resources more effectively. Third, this study contributes to the literature by recombining research from two distant literatures (IS and political sciences). Finally, this study has several important managerial implications for the public sector organizations.
Week 9_IT and officer safety _Aaron
Policy officers safeguard the public, but who protects our guardian? A working paper coauthored by Dr. Pang and Dr. Pavlou gives an interesting answer, information technology. This research investigated how IT could prevent violence against police officers. Specifically, the authors examined the relationship between IT use by the police and the number of police officers killed or assaulted in the line of duty.
Integrating the literature on IT-enabled organizational capabilities with the criminology, they theorized two mechanisms through which police IT use reduce violence against police officers by developing two key law enforcement capabilities, intelligence-led policing and community-oriented policing. The usage of three kinds of IT, analytics technologies, real-time response technologies and the internet, which facilitate such capability building, was hypothesized to make police officers safer.
To test the hypotheses, the authors utilized a large-scale dataset with 3921 police departments in 2 years combining police IT use, other operational information and annual crime statistics and public safety data. Random-effects models, along with negative binomial regressions and spatial auto-correlation models for validity check, provide a consistent and robust results that IT use for crime analysis, dispatch, and the internet is significantly associated with a decreased in the deaths of police officers. This effect is shown to be more pronounced in communities with a higher economic divide.
The paper initiatively builds a link between IT capabilities in organizations with criminology, contributing to the nascent literature on business value of IT in the public sector and broader societal impact of IT. Most importantly, the finding of this paper could be arguably generalized to the significant role of IT in safety of other occupations under unpredictable dangers.
Week 9_Pang, Tafti, and Krishnan (2014)_Yaeeun Kim
The authors examined whether IT improves administrative efficiency in U.S. state governments. This empirical study contributes to the IS literature by expanding the scope of IT value research to the public sector.
To be specific, U.S. state governments spent approximately 5% of the tax revenues in IT in 2004. On the other hand, for-profit firms used 3.6% of the sale revenue on IT in 2004. This fact enhances the necessity for policy makers to keep their eyes on the IT spending in public organizations. Two important factors motivated the authors to study: 1) the public sector is different from the private business context, and 2) the approach to measure the value effect of IT investments in the private sector may not be appropriate in the government context. In particular, for-profit context uses production function framework, but the public sector context is more suitable to use cost function.
For the analysis, the authors estimated the impact of IT investments on administrative efficiency with a two-stage estimation approach based on a multi-product translog cost function. In the first stage, they estimated cost inefficiency with a stochastic frontier model, and in the second stage, the estimated cost inefficiency was regressed on IT intensity and other exogenous factors by reflecting on the fact that the government outputs are exogenously given. As government agencies are expected to deliver necessary public service within a budget collected from tax, efficiency benefits of IT is more applicable in the public sector context than adopting the effect of IT on costs of goods sold. The applicable area of cost efficiency is not limited to human resources but opens to services, which is affected by automating organizational process by focusing on the automate and informate roles of IT.
Week 9_IT Use by the Police_Xue Guo
Pang and Pavlou (2016) studies the role of IT in preventing violence against police officers. Specifically, it examines the relationship between IT use by the police and number of police officers killed and assaulted.
The study theorizes that IT use by police helps to develop two kinds of capabilities—intelligence-led policing and community-oriented policing. First, the intelligence-led policing capabilities can help police to identify and solve crime, reduce the chance of violent encounters, and enable control crimes more proactively. Second, a cooperative relationship with the community can effectively control crime, and ensure police officers’ safety. Thus, both the intelligence-led policing and community-oriented policing leads to a reduction in violence against police officers. Then the paper proposes that the use of analytics technology, real-time response technology, and the Internet helps police to develop these IT capabilities.
Empirically, this study used panel data set collected from multi sources (such as LEMAS and UCR). The estimated model uses each functionality of the technology as a variable. The paper estimates the model with random-effects and uses negative binomial regression and spatial autocorrelation models for robustness checks. Also, the paper examines the moderating effects of income inequality and racial disparity. The results show that IT use for crime analysis, dispatch, and the Internet is associated with lower killings of police officers. At the same time, dispatch and in-filed report are associated with fewer assaults of police officers.
This paper provides innovative ideas to combine IT capabilities in organizations with criminology. It empirically demonstrates how different technologies are associated with the safety of the police officers. Also, it expands the current IS literature of IT business value in the public sector.
Week9_Politics and IT Investments_Ada
Politics and Information Technology Investments in the U.S. Federal Government in 2003-2016
Motivation：
The U.S. federal government spends a considerable amount of tax revenues in IT every year. Hence, taxpayers, who pay for these IT expenditures, would ask whether these investments are being well made. However, information systems (IS) researchers to date have paid little attention to what influences IT investments and management in the government sector (reference anonymized for blind review), an issue that would be significant to policy makers and the public in general as well as private-sector IT industries.
Research Questions:
This study investigates how the national politics affects IT investment profiles in U.S. federal agencies. They hypothesize that a federal agency’s capacity-building IT investments are associated with (i) legislative approval for the chief executive, (ii) government dividedness, and (iii) the agency’s ideological characteristic.
Main Findings:
With a panel dataset from 135 federal agencies and bureaus in 2003-2016, the empirical analyses demonstrate that the national politics has a significant impact on their IT investment profiles. They find that a federal agency is more likely to make capacity-building IT investments when its chief executive is blessed with legislative approval, when the federal government is more united, and when it is ideologically more moderate. In sum, their study supports the central proposition that in order to invest more in major capacity-building IT development, the federal agencies need to secure compelling policy mandates and political legitimacy from Congress for implementation of strategic policy initiatives..
Contributions:
They contribute to the IS literature by demonstrating that budget allocation decisions between IT development and maintenance in governments are affected by political environments. They offer several policy prescriptions in federal IT management for policymakers and practitioners in the public sector.
Week 9_Pang et al. (2015)_Jung Kwan Kim
Pang, Tafti, and Krishnan (2015) conjoin multiple perspectives of the Information system, Public economics, and Political science literatures to examine the relationship between IT and governmental size. More specifically, the authors attempt to reveal the impact of IT budgets of a state CIO on state government size.
Theoretically, we can expect both positive and negative relationships. On the one hand, as the Hypothesis 1A argues, “the size of CIO IT budgets in a state is associated with lower state government spending.” This argument can be supported in that the introduction and advancement of IT systems may 1) increase the productivity of administrative processes, 2) ameliorate information asymmetry between legislatures and governmental agencies with lower monitoring costs, and 3) decrease the costs of transaction and coordination by more privatization of public services. Collectively, these benefits facilitate the reduction of government size.
On the other hand, the competing Hypothesis 1B contends that “the size of CIO IT budgets in a state is associated with larger state government spending.” Its main rationales are, 1) the IT infrastructure and enterprise systems may create strategic initiatives to serve public areas which used to be underserved; 2) the enhanced capabilities to monitor and coordinate administrative processes can lead to push further the boundary of administration, even incorporating some roles of federal, local, and private players.
Based on system GMM model with a five-year unbalanced panel data of 190 observations from 44 states, the empirical test supports the Hypothesis 1A, implying that more IT investment by state CIOs are associated with lower state governmental expenditures. This main finding suggests that the increase in the IT budgets by state CIOs may mitigate “bureaucrats’ interests to maximize their expenditures.”
Week 8_Huang et al. (2013)_Xinyu
Appropriability Mechanisms and the Platform Partnership Decision: Evidence from Enterprise Software
The efficacy of intellectual property rights (IPR) as a mechanism to appropriate the returns from innovation has been studied with mixed empirical findings. Following prior literature, this research examines whether ownership of IPR and downstream capabilities such as marketing capability is an effective mechanism to encourage the owner of innovation (or so-called ISV) to join proprietary platform and prevent platform owner to expropriate the innovation. The study is conducted in the environment of software industry, and SAP is the software platform investigated.
The paper proposes that both of the two anti-expropriation mechanisms will increase the probability of ISV partnering with the software platform. It also propose that strong downstream capabilities, therefore, will weaken the value of intellectual property protection mechanism. Finally, it posits the value of IP protection will be enhanced if the markets served by the ISV grow rapidly. In this research, partnership with software platform is indicated using a binary data based on ISVs’ decision to become certified by a platform or not. Downstream capabilities is measured by trademarks and consulting services, and market growth is measured by sales growth. The primary model is built upon a survival model. However, for the purpose of robustness check, it also use generalized estimating equation model and linear probability model with fixed effects, as well as alternative measurement for key variables. Three hypotheses are all verified.
Week 8_Kleis et al. (2012)_Vicky Xu
Information Technology and Intangible Output: The Impact of IT Investment on Innovation Productivity
Since the prior research focused on the contribution of IT to firm-level productivity and less research concern about the relationship between IT, knowledge creation, and innovation output, Kleis et al. (2012) try to identify the contribution of IT to innovate production across multiple contexts using a quality-based measure of innovation output.
Kleis et al. (2012) address the conceptual model of knowledge production that based on the knowledge production function (KPF) shown as the following (Figure 1. P47):
Kleis et al. (2012) collected a panel dataset comprised of annual information on innovation spending research and development (R&D), IT spending, and citation-weighted patents for large U.S. firms between 1987 and 1997. For empirical analysis, Kleis et al. (2012) build two sets of analyses to analyze more than 1800 observations: First, involving a thorough examination of the core research questions. Second, involving further analysis of the impact of IT on innovation output.
The main contribution of this study: (1). The estimation results indicate that IT and R&D both play positive and significant roles in innovation production. (2). The results highlight that R&D has a positive impact on citation-weighted patent output, meanwhile, the firm size is inversely related to patent output. (3). The final results demonstrate an important aspect of IT and the innovation creation process (i.e. networks, e-mail, telecommunication, etc. also contribute to the innovation process). (4). The estimates of the return to investment for IT-driven innovation appear to be economically meaningful and have market value impact.
Week8_Mani et al. Yiran
Captive centers are wholly-owned by the multinational corporations (MNCs) to conduct the R&D and new product development offshore, which also refers to captive offshoring. Previous research indicates that the performance of distributed work is adversely impacted by failures of cooperation, i.e., misaligned incentives, as well as failures of coordination. The authors analyzed survey data from 132 R&D CCs established by foreign multinational companies in India to understand how firms execute distributed innovative work.
There are two generic categories of coordinating mechanisms for building and maintaining common ground, namely, information sharing and modularization. The information sharing strategy involves ongoing communication between interdependent agents to dynamically update common ground. A modularization strategy involves limited ongoing interaction between the agents. The author aim to examine the moderation role of three task attribution: task routineness; task analyzability and task familiarity. The hypothesis are listed below:
Hypothesis 1A (H1A). With high interdependence,
higher levels of modularization will increase performance
only when task routineness is high; when task routineness is low, higher levels of modularization will decrease
performance.
Hypothesis 1B (H1B). With high interdependence,
higher levels of modularization will increase performance
only when task analyzability is high; when analyzability is low, higher levels of modularization will decrease
performance.
Hypothesis 1C (H1C). With high interdependence,
higher levels of modularization will increase performance
only when task familiarity is high; when task familiarity is low, higher levels of modularization will decrease
performance.
Hypothesis 2A (H2A). With high interdependence,
information sharing as a coordination mechanism will
increase performance only when routineness is low; when
routineness is high, higher levels of information sharing
will decrease performance.
Hypothesis 2B (H2B). With high interdependence,
information sharing as a coordination mechanism will
increase performance only when analyzability is low; when
analyzability is high, higher levels of information sharing
will decrease performance.
Hypothesis 2C (H2C). With high interdependence,
information sharing as a coordination mechanism will
increase performance only when task familiarity is low;
when task familiarity is high, higher levels of information
sharing will decrease performance.
Regarding the first set of Hypothesis. Hypothesis 1A and 1b are supported, showing that Modularization improves performance only when routineness and analyzability are high. In terms of the second set of hypothesis, results are consistent with the interaction plots, which show that on average, information sharing improves performance for R&D work. However, a significant difference in slopes between high and low levels of task attributes is observed only in comparing projects of low versus high familiarity. The difference in slopes for the other
task variables is insignificant. Only Hypothesis 2C is supported.
The key contribution of this study lies in the careful explication of the conditions under which choice of investments in modularization versus information sharing yield different performance outcomes.It shows that the success of this strategy has to be evaluated based on the nature of the underlying work.
Week8_Forman and Zeebroeck (2012)_Yaeeun Kim
The authors examined the basic Internet adoption for reducing the coordination costs of geographically dispersed firm teams. They hypothesized that adoption of basic Internet will be associated with an increase in the likelihood of collaboration for multi-inventor, geographically dispersed teams (hypothesis 1); Adoption of basic Internet will be associated with a smaller increase in the likelihood of collaboration for single-location multi-inventor teams than for geographically dispersed teams (hypothesis 2); and Adoption of basic Internet will be associated with a smaller increase in the likelihood of collaboration for single inventors than for geographically dispersed teams (hypothesis 3).
For analysis, they used fixed effects panel data model. Their findings suggest that there is no evidence of a link between Internet adoption and within-location collaborative patents. There is no evidence of a relationship between basic Internet and single-inventor patents. These evidences show that basic Internet adoption lowered the coordination costs of geographically dispersed research teams. This does not have to be interpreted as easier access to electronic knowledge systems or shared resources rendered an increase in research output of those who adopted basic Internet. .
The result suggests that IT can be used to integrate geographically dispersed operations, either obtained through acquisition or deliberately dispersed. The limitation of the study oriented from the sample data is one sample size and one period of time within U.S. When they design their international R&D organization, firms mostly regard the following options: a centralized organization that provides higher control and decentralized structure that enables local knowledge resources but increasing coordination cost. However, the study result supports that IT investments may substantially alter the trade-off and decentralized model more attractive, which encourages a more distant R&D activities within firms.
Week8_Mani et al. (2014)_Aaron
Technology advances in distributed work lead to a growing phenomenon that increasing number of firms set up offshore captive centers (CCs) to carry out R&D work. In this context, Mani et al. (2014) studies how organizations coordinate distributed knowledge intensive work (e.g., R&D).
Prior literature has suggested two generic coordination mechanism, information sharing and modularization, but do not reach any conclusion about the superiority of one of these mechanisms for any given task. This study address such research gap by raising a question, what combinations of task characteristics and coordination mechanisms yield high performance in the context of interdependent knowledge work?
The authors analyzed survey data from 132 R&D CCs established by foreign multinational companies in India to understand how firms execute distributed innovative work. They found that 1) modularization of work across locations is largely ineffective when the underlying tasks are less routinized, less analyzable and less familiar to the CCs; and 2) information sharing across locations is effective when the CC performs tasks that are less familiar to it.
The primary contribution of this study is to demonstrate high performance work configurations in offshoring of R&D and product development work, given that the tasks analyzed are highly interdependent. Its results expand studies on organization and coordination of distributed work as well as for practitioners who want to improve the performance of their distributed R&D strategies. This study has following weakness: the cross-sectional analysis may limit its ability to establish causality, the measures are perceptual and the unobserved heterogeneities are not controlled.
Week8_Forman and van Zeebroeck (2012)_Ada
From Wires to Partners: How the Internet Has Fostered R&D Collaborations Within Firms
Motivation:
Historically, collaborative work has been hampered by the existence of significant coordination costs that increase with team size, geographic dispersion, and heterogeneity of team composition. It is widely believed that the adoption of information technology increase the returns to collaborative work. However, little systematic empirical work on the implications of IT investment has been done for industrial research.
Research Question:
The main hypothesis of this paper is that by reducing the coordination costs of collaborative work, investments in IT will be associated with an increase in the likelihood of geographically dispersed, multi-inventor collaborative research teams relative to other types of research teams (including output from single location and lone inventors).
Main Findings:
They find that basic Internet adoption is associated with an increased likelihood of collaborative patents from geographically dispersed teams, which is in contrast with previous finding that IT adoption leads to a disproportionately greater increase in collaborations among researchers who are geographically close to one another. On the contrary, they find no evidence of such a link between Internet adoption and within-location collaborative patents nor single-inventor patents.
Hightlights:
The method they use to address the assumption that Internet adoption is exogenous.
- First, reverse causality. They utilize the timing of Internet adoption as the source of a falsification exercise. They find no evidence that the incidence of cross location research collaborations is correlated with a location pair’s future adoption of Internet technology; that is, location pairs who adopt Internet technology experience no increase in the likelihood of a collaborative patent prior to adoption.
- Instrumental variables. We employ two sets of instruments that capture local variance in the costs to adopting Internet technology. The first addresses cross-sectional differences in local regulatory conditions that will shape the costs of purchasing Internet access. The second captures cross-sectional differences in familiarity and expertise with the Internet in the local regions where the establishments reside.
Week 8_Setia et al. (2012)_Jung Kwan Kim
Setia, Rajagopalan, and Sambamurthy, and Calantone (2012) point out that the contribution of peripheral developers in open-source software projects has not been well understood. The authors in this study attempt to reveal the impact of peripheral developers, in comparison with core developers, on product quality and diffusion and the moderating effect of OSS product life cycle.
The authors find that peripheral developers endow a greater impact on the quality assessment because they supply independent, novel, and unique insights for detecting bugs in the projects. Peripheral developers also contribute to expedite the product awareness and adoption owing to their interpersonal network and word-of-mouth communication; since the personal network of peripheral developers does not suffer from institutional influences or corporate promotions, the information shared through the network tends to receive better credibility, leading better exposure and adoption for potential users.
Interestingly, the positive impact of peripheral developers is not supported for quality enhancement in the study’s empirical analysis. The authors suggest, a larger project may require complex coordination efforts which may prevent active participation of peripheral developers. Also, the lack of efficient coordination mechanism can be another culprit to accommodate geographically dispersed contributions from the developers.
A mature product may represent that its OSS product has been well managed with high quality. This signaling effect can be a good explanation for the authors’ findings: the participation of peripheral developers at a mature stage influences positively on quality assessment, product awareness, and product adoption greater than at earlier stages.
In conclusion, the authors show that the contribution of peripheral developers takes up a significant portion of an OSS outcome, especially combined with the moderating effect of project life cycle. Strategically using this dynamic is a mandate for an OSS organization or a corporate, which aims to leverage the synergy based on the volunteering dedication of peripheral developers.
Week 8_Setia et al. 2012_ Xue Guo
How Peripheral Developers Contribute to Open-Source Software Development
This paper is motivated by the different contributions of Open-Source Software (OSS) Development made by core developers and peripheral developers. Authors of this article explore the role of peripheral developers in OSS product quality and diffusion and how these effects vary across the product life cycle of OSS projects.
Peripheral developers’ motivations and contributions are different from core developers of an OSS project. First, peripheral developers are motivated to contribute the product quality for their own consumption or demonstrate their adherence to the certain community. Second, software adopters rely on the information from their community, and peripheral developers can act as knowledge sources to help the spread information about OSS product. Thus, the paper argues that compared with core developer, peripheral developers have more contributions to the OSS product quality and diffusion. And these effects are more salient in the product mature stage than in the early stages.
Empirically, the paper collects 1966 monthly observations over 147 products. Because of the nested nature of the research design, the paper uses hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Model1 assesses the variability in diffusion and quality in each level. Model 2 identifies the direct impact of the predictors. And Model 3 tests the cross-level effects at the periodic and product levels. The empirical results showed that peripheral developers’ contribution to product quality assessment is more salient than core developers. And, the peripheral developers’ participation significantly influences product diffusion. Finally, their influences on product quality and diffusion are various across the product life-cycle stages.
Moreover, the paper examined the paradox of peripheral developers’ contribution and found that project size and coordination may moderate the effects of peripheral developers on product quality enhancement. In all, this paper revealed the different roles of developers and differentiated the contributions made by core developers and peripheral developers for OSS projects.