The business value of information technology (IT) has been debated for a number of years. While some authors have attributed large productivity improvements and substantial consumer benefits to IT, others report that IT has not had any bottom line impact on business profitability. In this paper,...

As search costs and other coordination costs decline, theory predicts that firms should optimally increase the number of suppliers with which they do business. Despite recent declines in these costs due to information technology, there is little evidence of an increase in the number of suppliers...

Despite evidence that information technology (IT) has recently become a productive investment for a large cross-section of firms, a number of questions remain. Some of these issues can be addressed by extending the basic production function approach that was applied in earlier work....

Productivity is the bottom line for any investment. The quandary of information technology (IT) is that, despite astonishing improvements in the underlying capabilities of the computer, its productivity has proven almost impossible to assess. There is an increasing perception that IT has not...

As an economic good, software has a number of interesting properties. In addition to the value of intrinsic features, the creation of or conformance to industry standards may be critical to the success of a product. This research builds and evaluates econometric models to determine which product...

Over the past decade, American businesses have invested heavily in information technology (IT) hardware. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to assess the benefits that have resulted. One reason is that managers often buy IT to enhance customer value in ways that are largely ignored in...

In recent years, the relationship between information technology (IT) and productivity has become a source of debate. In the 1980s and early 1990s, empirical research generally did not significant productivity improvements associated with IT investments. More recently, as new data are identified...

The "productivity paradox" of information systems (IS) is that, despite enormous improvements in the underlying technology, the benefits of IS spending have not been found in aggregate output statistics. One explanation is that IS spending may lead to increases in product quality or variety...

We analyze pricing strategies for digital information goods, such as those increasingly available via the Internet. Because perfect copies of such goods can be created and distributed almost costlessly, any single positive price for copies is likely to be socially inefficient. However, we show...

The business value of information technology (IT) has been debated for a number of years. Some authors have found large productivity improvements attributable to computers, as well as evidence that IT has generated substantial benefits for consumers. However, others continue to question whether...