How to present your research in conferences?
Professor: What do you think about my presentation? What makes my presentation interesting?
Studnet 1: At first, your presentation told an interesting story. For the first two slides, you use examples and interesting narratives to attract audiences. Secondly, you add a lot of pictures in the presentation, which makes it not boring.
Student 2: I think one advantage of your presentation is that you can interact with audiences, making all of us felt related to the study.
Student 3: In my opinion, telling story is very important. You provide background about the study and provide police officers examples, which show that Officer safety is a big problem in the urban area. This is a good way to attract people’s attention.
Student 4: I think keeping voice up and down also helps attract the audience. If the presenter’s voice lacks variations, it will make the presentation boring.
Professor: Yes. At first, you need to learn how to present your research in a limited time. It will be more difficult to present your research in 15 minutes than 20 minutes. Once, I was asked to present my research in 12 minutes. So it is not possible to show every detail of your research. For a conference presentation, you cannot talk about everything. What do you think is the purpose of the conference presentation?
Student 3: I think conference presentation could help us get ideas from others. People will connect their research interests with your study, and give valuable opinions. Also, it provides a good opportunity to present your research to potential reviewers. Thus, they can offer you some feedbacks before the review process. It is like a practice.
Student 4: Sometimes, we may be too focused on our ideas and think our study are very interesting. But it is important for us to show it to others and get ideas from the people who are not familiar with the study. They probably will point out problems that cannot be discovered by us.
Student 5: I think one important purpose of conference presentation is to make self-advertisement. You are trying to sell your research to others.
Student 1: I always try to explain my research to my parents. Present research to people who are not familiar with the research can get new insights. Also, we can learn something during the presentation process.
Professor: Yes. You make a good point. You will act as a salesman in a conference. You want to sell your research to the potential editors and reviewers. That’s the function of a conference. Obviously, you don’t have much time to tell everything. You need to convince audiences that you are doing interesting research. It is very important to grasp their intentions. So you don’t want to start your presentation with boring statements, such as “Mobile industry is a big industry (ambiguous)”. You need to think about how to grasp their intentions. An excellent presentation takes a lot of practices.
One thing in my presentation is that I didn’t use text until the page 14. A picture is worth more than a thousand words. So when I prepared a presentation, I spend a lot of time on finding good pictures.
Student 2: Can you share some tips on how to practice? What is the most effective way to practice?
Professor: Present your research to the audience who knows nothing about the research is a good way to practice. I always present my research in front of my wife, and she gives me interesting advice. Also, you can gather some friends or colleagues and practice in front of them.
About texts and figures, I use texts because I did not want to memorize my script. I can look up the slide and explain. But if you use figures, you have to memorize everything. However, in a presentation, you don’t want always to watch the screen, which makes less interaction between you and the audience. Remember, a good presentation is a two-way communication. Another important point is that if you don’t know how to use animation, you’d better avoid it.
Student 3: Yes. Once I tried to insert five slides content into one slide. If the computer in the presentation room is not compatible with yours, the animation will change. It will not achieve the expected results.
Professor: Yes. I don’t recommend you using too much animation. Also, it is a good idea to show context using graphs and numbers.
Student 3: I think another advantage of your presentation is that you can keep the audience calm and avoid their questions. I also noticed that you did not show the literature and theory part in the slides.
Professor: Yes. I don’t like showing literature review in a presentation. If you show the literature review part in your presentation, it maybe not an interesting research from the beginning. You have to demonstrate this is a new and interesting research without literature review. Showing literature review means you are just a follower. Of course, some people have different opinions about this.
Also, I skipped the robustness check fast, because I think it is not the core part of my study. You don’t want to spend a lot of time at the end of the presentation. I just showed the summarized results and contributions. Please think hard about which part of your research is more important and what is not. However, people always like to ask questions about details. In this case, you can prepare extra slides to show literature reviews, definitions, and correlation table. When someone asks specific questions, you can show them these details.
Student 4: Can you provide some tips for the Q&A section?
Professor: My advice is that practice is important. At first, I was also scared about the Q&A part. You probably will get similar questions. So it is a good idea to go over the first round review from a journal. Then you can prepare what kind of questions you will meet. For a conference presentation, it is more important to sell your story than to get comments. My experience tells me that sometimes it was difficult to get valuable feedbacks.
Student 3: One of my advisors likes to send papers to a lot of people and get feedbacks. When you present your work, audiences may not totally understand what you are doing. It is a very limited time window. But if you sent papers to them, they have more time to read it. Then they probably will provide more valuable feedbacks.
Professor: Yes. You could ask friendly reviews. But remember, you cannot nominate these as your reviewers when you submit the paper to journals.
Student 1: My question is that what is the condition to be nominated?
Professor: People who have the conflict of interest should not be nominated. These include teachers, colleagues, coauthors ( a five-year window). Reviewers are supposed to be someone without the conflict of interest.
Select Papers for Week 13 and 14
For Week 13 and 14, I will ask each student to select one paper for us to read and discuss.
- Please select two papers and send me by Monday, April 4. I will choose one of them.
- The papers should be published at top IS or other business journals.
- The topics must be among the ones in our seminar.
Please let me know if you have any question.
Final Term Paper – due by Friday, May 6, 11:59 PM
The final term paper is due by Friday, May 6 at 11:59PM EST. Submit your term paper by email.
Be advised that there will be no “incomplete” grade. Missing this deadline will result in a failing grade.
WISE Presentation Slides
Week 11_Mithas and Whitaker (2007)_Xinyu
Is the World Flat or Spiky? Information Intensity, Skills, and Global Service Disaggregation
Service Disaggregation driven by information technology has been studied on industry, firm and plant level. Yet, none has taken the angle of occupation on individual level to understand the determinants of global service disaggregation. This paper thus extend the previous research on service activities by proposing a positive relationship between information intensity and service disaggregation potential, driven by IT. Furthermore, it hypothesizes that the positive effect of information intensity on disaggregation potential is mediated through three characteristics of occupations: codifiability, standardizability, and modularizability. Considering the important role of skill level of occupation, the paper also posits that the skill level has both direct and indirect negative impact on those three characteristics and disaggregation potential. Finally, the necessity of physical presence is posited to reduce the potential of service disaggregation.
The paper provides empirical evidence by using a combined dataset from different sources, which contains more than 300 occupations. Most of the key variables are manually coded and self-verified. An OLS model is applied as the main model, and an ordered probit model is used for robustness check. The results support the direct positive effect of information intensity on disaggregation potential, as well as partial mediating effect only by modularizability. Also, a mixed support of occupational skill level arises. The findings point out what make service occupations easy to be disaggregated and explains the mechanism behind this causality.
Week 11_Aral et al 2012 Yiran
The authors propose that some information technologies could complement such incentive practices. They develop an analytical model that illustrates this complementarity and demonstrate how the corpresence of IT and incentive practices can explain variation in both the returns to IT and the effectiveness of performance pay contracts and human resource (HR) analytics practices that monitor and provide feedback on performance. A principal–agent model is used with moral hazard to illustrate the complementarity of HCM software and compensation systems that include HR analytics practices and performance pay.
To test three-way complementarities between performance pay, HR analytics, and IT, they used a data set surveying the detailed human resource practices of these 189 firms in 2005, of which about half (90) adopted the HCM system. To distinguish the reverse causality, that is, firms may choose to adopt HCM when they perform well or experience exogenous shocks to productivity. The authors separately measure the decision to invest and the actual investment itself.
The results show that the adoption of HCM software is greatest in firms that have also adopted performance pay and HR analytics practices. Furthermore, HCM adoption is associated with a large productivity premium when it is implemented as a system of organizational incentives, but has less benefit when adopted in isolation. The system of three-way complements produces disproportionately greater benefits than pairwise interactions, highlighting the importance of including all three complements.
Week11_Tambe and Hitt (2014)_Yaeeun Kim
This study purposed to test the hypothesis that firms benefit from the IT investments of other firms because the flow of specialized technical know-how among organizations facilitates the implementation of new IT innovations. The network provides the basis of the flow of knowledge. As the development of a workforce of engineers with experience redesigning workflow is important for the diffusion of new production methods, IT workers play a similarly important role in spreading the expertise in organizations.
The result suggests that IT labor flows are an important mechanism for the transmission of productivity spillovers related to IT-enabled production methods. In the robust estimates, the elasticity of the pool of external IT investment takes how volume of internal IT investment. This shows that firms located in high density of high-tech companies, where IT investment is likely to be much higher, may receive substantial economic benefit. The benefits are oriented form IT labor flows among firms. The study showed that IT labor flow explains the underlying mechanism, which drives regional IT spillovers.
The findings imply that manager should pay attention to locate their firms in the middle of the IT spill-over. The paper suggests Silicon Valley as an option. The location brings competitive benefits to attract workers. On the other hand, policy makers are suggested to focus on shaping the industry as rigid labor market with high level of labor mobility. The study is however limited in explaining how to develop IT spill-over effect by adopting IT.
Week 11_Mithas and Whitaker (2007)_Vicky Xu
Is the World Flat or Spiky? Information Intensity, Skills, and Global Service Disaggregation
Mithas and Whitaker (2007) developed the previous research (Apte and Mason1995, Rai et al. 2006) to a theory of service disaggregation and identified the codifiability, standardizability, and modularizeability of an occupation as mediating mechanisms for the effect of information intensity on the global disaggregation of services. Moreover, Mithas and Whitaker (2007) studied the patterns in U.S. employment and salary growth from 2000 to 2004.
Mithas and Whitaker (2007) addressed two main research questions in this study:
(1). Which service occupations are the most susceptible to global disaggregation?
(2). What are the factors and mechanisms that make service occupations amenable to global disaggregation?
By extending Apte and Mason’s conceptual research, Mithas and Whitaker (2007) presented a conceptual research model as the following (Figure 1, P. 238):
Combining data from all different separate sources, Mithas and Witaker (2007) used ordinary least squares (OLS) to analyze 322 observations for which they had data on all variables. There are several findings in this study: (1) A positive association between information intensity and perceived disaggregation potential. (2) A negative association between the need for physical presence and perceived disaggregation potential. (3) A positive, statistically significant association between the need for physical presence and employment growth and a negative, statistically significant between the need for physical presence and salary growth. (4) High information-intensive and high-skill occupations have actually experienced higher employment growth. (5) High information-intensive and high-skill occupations have experienced a slight decline in salary growth.
The key contributions of this study include: First, this study contributes to an understanding of the global disaggregation of service activities by identifying the factors and mechanisms which extending the research of Apte and Mason (1995) and Rai et al. (2006). Second, the findings of this study suggest two important policy and managerial implications.
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 11 – Labor – paper assignment
| Mithas and Whitaker (2007) | Xinyu |
| Mithas and Whitaker (2007) | Vicky |
| Aral et al. (2012) | Yiran |
| Tambe and Hitt (2014) | JK |
| Tambe and Hitt (2014) | Yae Eun |
| Bloom et al. (2014) | Aaron |
| Bloom et al. (2014) | Xue |
| Pierce et al. (2015) | Ada |
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