The Strength of Weak Ties and Brokerage Theory both rely on the argument that weak bridging ties deliver novel information to create "vision advantages" for actors in brokerage positions. But our conceptualization of novelty is itself fundamentally underdeveloped. We, therefore, develop a theory...

While it is now well established that IT intensive firms are more productive, a critical question remains: Does IT cause productivity or are productive firms simply willing to spend more on IT? We address this question by examining the productivity and performance effects of enterprise systems...

This paper considers the design and analysis of networked experiments, which are rapidly becoming one of the most precise tools available for studying social behavior. As a result of digitization, the scale, scope and complexity of networked experiments has greatly expanded in recent years,...

Understanding peer influence in networks is critical to estimating product demand and diffusion, creating effective viral marketing, and designing ‘network interventions’ to promote positive social change. But several statistical challenges make it difficult to econometrically identify peer...

It remains unknown whether personalized recommendations increase or decrease the diversity of content people consume. We present results from a randomized field experiment on Spotify testing the effect of personalized recommendations on consumption diversity. In the experiment, both control and...

We examine what drives the diffusion of different types of information through email networks and the effects of these diffusion patterns on the productivity and performance of information workers. In particular, we ask: What predicts the likelihood of an individual becoming aware of a strategic...

The authors propose that a tradeoff between network diversity and communications bandwidth regulates the degree to which social networks deliver non-redundant information to actors in brokerage positions. As the structural diversity of a network increases, the bandwidth of the communication...

We econometrically evaluate information worker productivity at a midsize executive recruiting firm and assess whether the knowledge that workers accessed through their electronic communication networks enabled them to multitask more productively. We estimate dynamic panel data models of...

Researchers have recently been able to understand organizations at an unprecedented level of detail using new digital records and electronic communication data. However, while digital communication is important in the modern workplace, face-to-face interaction still represents a large and...