The revival in US productivity growth since the mid-1990s is linked to a surge in investment in information and communication technologies (ICT). Against the backdrop of a weakening link between productivity and traditional innovation inputs (e.g. R&D expenditure), digitization has spurred...

The revival in US productivity growth since the mid-1990s is linked to a surge in investment in information and communication technologies (ICT). Against the backdrop of a weakening link between productivity and traditional innovation inputs (e.g. R&D expenditure), digitization has spurred...

Partnering with the Census we implement a new survey of "structured" management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variation across plants within the same firm. This management variation accounts for...

We study the fine-grained relationships among information flows, IT use,and individual information-worker productivity, by analyzing work at amidsize executive recruiting firm. We analyze both project-level andindividual-level performance using: (1) direct observation of over125,000 e-mail...

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

As search costs and other coordination costs decline, theory predictsthat firms should optimally increase the number of suppliers with whichthey do business. Despite recent declines in these costs due toinformation technology, there is little evidence of an increase in thenumber of suppliers...

Organizations are transforming their relationships with their businesspartners. For example, instead of playing off dozens or even hundreds ofcompeting suppliers against each other, many firms are finding it moreprofitable to work closely with only a small number of"partners". While these firms...

As the Internet develops into a robust channel for commerce, it will be important to understand the characteristics of electronic markets. Businesses, consumers, government regulators, and academic researchers face a variety of questions when analyzing these nascent markets. Will electronic...

We present a framework and empirical estimates that quantify the economic impact of increased product variety made available through electronic markets. Recent research has focused on the effect of increased competition on Internet market efficiency. While these efficiency gains significantly...

Price dispersion among commodity goods is typically attributed to consumer search costs. This paper explores the magnitude of consumer search benefits and costs using a data set obtained from a major Internet shopbot. For the median consumer, the benefits to searching lower screens are $6.55...