There is plenty of hype around big data, but does it simply offer operational advantages, or can it provide firms with sustainable competitive advantage? To answer this question, we look at big data using a classic framework called the 'resource-based view of the firm,' which states that, for...

The rise of dominant firms in data driven industries is often credited to their alleged data advantage. Empirical evidence lending support to this conjecture is surprisingly scarce. In this paper we document that data as an input into machine learning tasks display features that support the...