We examine the factors underlying buyer demand for large Information Technology solutions in order to understand the competitive crash in large scale commercial computing. We examine individual buyer data from two periods. The first is in the mid 1980's, late in the period of a mature and stable...

A recent empirical literature has shaken economists' confidence in the value of aggregate (industry-level) data to illuminate production relationships. But the statistical finding "you can't aggregate," however well documented, is not an economic explanation. Plant-level relationships do...