Showing 1 - 10 of 82
As more and more activities in the economy become digitized, analytics and data-driven decision-making (DDD) are becoming increasingly important. The adoption of analytics and DDD has been slower in small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) compared to large firms, and reliable causal estimates of the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014248007
We study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from 5,179 customer support agents. Access to the tool increases productivity, as measured by issues resolved per hour, by 14 percent on average, with the greatest impact on novice and low-skilled...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014250178
Remote work surged during the Covid pandemic but there is disagreement about the extent of the change. To address this question, we field a new, nationally-representative survey: the Remote Life Survey (RLS). We find that in October 2020, 31.6 percent of the continuously employed workforce...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014250210
The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify existing healthcare processes and create new, more efficient ones is a major topic of discussion in the industry. Yet healthcare lags other industries in AI adoption. In this paper, we estimate that wider adoption of AI could lead to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013537751
Amidst the rise of remote work, we ask: what are the effects of proximity to coworkers? We find being near coworkers has tradeoffs: proximity increases long-run human capital development at the expense of short-term output. We study software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm, whose main campus has...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014437011
We study the early adoption and diffusion of five AI-related technologies (automated-guided vehicles, machine learning, machine vision, natural language processing, and voice recognition) as documented in the 2018 Annual Business Survey of 850,000 firms across the United States. We find that...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014421214
How prevalent are severe software vulnerabilities, how fast do software users respond to the availability of secure versions, and what determines the variance in the installation distribution? Using the largest dataset ever assembled on user updates, tracking server software updates by over...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014635659
There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012471170
How do you measure the value of a commodity that transacts at a price of zero from an economic standpoint? This study examines the potential for and extent of omission and misattribution in standard approaches to economic accounting with regards to open source software, an unpriced commodity in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012510617
We argue that the intrinsic inefficiency of proprietary software has historically created a space for alternative institutions that provide software as a public good. We discuss several sources of such inefficiency, focusing on one that has not been described in the literature: the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463702