计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

The Internet could change the lives of average citizens as much as did the telephone in the early part of the 20th century and television in the 1950s and 1960s. Researchers and social critics are debating whether the Internet is improving or harming participation in community life and social relationships. This research examined the social and psychological impact of the Internet on 169 people in 73 households during their first 1 to 2 years on-line. We used longitudinal data to examine the effects of the Internet on social involvement and psychological well-being. In this sample, the Internet was used extensively for communication. Nonetheless, greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in participants' communication with family members in the household, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their depression and loneliness. These findings have implications for research, for public policy and for the design of technology.

Internet paradox: A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being?

Despite the importance to researchers, managers, and policy makers of how information technology (IT) contributes to organizational performance, there is uncertainty and debate about what we know and don't know. A review of the literature reveals that studies examining the association between information technology and organizational performance are divergent in how they conceptualize key constructs and their interrelationships. We develop a model of IT business value based on the resource-based view of the firm that integrates the various strands of research into a single framework. We apply the integrative model to synthesize what is known about IT business value and guide future research by developing propositions and suggesting a research agenda. A principal finding is that IT is valuable, but the extent and dimensions are dependent upon internal and external factors, including complementary organizational resources of the firm and its trading partners, as well as the competitive and macro environment. Our analysis provides a blueprint to guide future research and facilitate knowledge accumulation and creation concerning the organizational performance impacts of information technology.

Review: information technology and organizational performance: an integrative model of it business value

This paper aims to clarify the concept of business models, its usages, and its roles in the Information Systems domain. A review of the literature shows a broad diversity of understandings, usages, and places in the firm. The paper identifies the terminology or ontology used to describe a business model, and compares this terminology with previous work. Then the general usages, roles and potential of the concept are outlined. Finally, the connection between the business model concept and Information Systems is described in the form of eight propositions to be analyzed in future work.

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Clarifying Business Models: Origins, Present, and Future of the Concept

The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

Despite significant progress in evaluating the productivity payoffs from information technology (IT), the inability of traditional firm-level economic analysis to account fully for the intangible impacts of IT has led to calls for a more inclusive and comprehensive approach to measuring IT business value. In response to this call, we develop a process-oriented model to assess the impacts of IT on critical business activities within the value chain. Our model incorporates corporate goals for IT and management practices as key determinants of realized IT payoffs. Using survey data from 304 business executives worldwide, we found that corporate goals for IT can be classified into one of four types: unfocused, operations focus, market focus, and dual focus. Our analysis confirms that these goals are useful indicators of payoffs from IT in that executives in firms with more focused goals for IT perceive greater payoffs from IT across the value chain. In addition, we found that management practices such as strategic alignment and IT investment evaluation contribute to higher perceived levels of IT business value.

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Executives' perceptions of the business value of information technology: a process-oriented approach

In this study, we developed a conceptual model for studying the adoption of electronic business (e-business or EB) at the firm level, incorporating six adoption facilitators and inhibitors, based on the technology-organization-environment theoretical framework. Survey data from 3100 businesses and 7500 consumers in eight European countries were used to test the proposed adoption model. We conducted confirmatory factor analysis to assess the reliability and validity of constructs. To examine whether adoption patterns differ across different e-business environments, we divided the full sample into high EB-intensity and low EB-intensity countries. After controlling for variations of industry and country effects, the fitted Iogit models demonstrated four findings: (1) Technology competence, firm scope and size, consumer readiness, and competitive pressure are significant adoption drivers, while lack of trading partner readiness is a significant adoption inhibitor. (2) As EB-intensity increases, two environmental factors - consumer readiness and lack of trading partner readiness - become less important, while competitive pressure remains significant. (3) In high EB-intensity countries, e-business is no longer a phenomenon dominated by large firms; as more and more firms engage in e-business, network effect works to the advantage of small firms. (4) Firms are more cautious in adopting e-business in high EB-intensity countries - it seems to suggest that the more informed firms are less aggressive in adopting e-business, a somehow surprising result. Explanations and implications are offered.

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Electronic business adoption by European firms: a cross-country assessment of the facilitators and inhibitors

In an era when new ideas are brought to the market by global value networks of specialists rather than by one company, a key question is who captures the most value from innovation in such a structure, and why? This paper addresses the question of who benefits from innovation in global value chains by looking at specific computer and electronics products. We apply a novel industry studies methodology for measuring the distribution of financial value across the supply chains for two models from Apple’s iPod family and notebook PC models from Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard (HP). These are all examples of globally innovated products, combining technologies from the U.S., Japan, and other countries, and assembled in China.
Our analysis shows that the gross margins of Apple for its high-end iPod products are generally higher than those earned by HP and Lenovo for notebook PCs, although not so high as to be considered “supernormal.” A key reason for the difference is that Apple’s control of the core software, proprietary standards and complementary infrastructure of the iPod enables it to retain greater profits, whereas a large share of the PC industry profits are siphoned off to Microsoft and Intel who control key technical standards. Consistent with Teece (1986), our results confirm the importance of stages of technical evolution, appropriability regimes and complementary assets as determinants of profiting from innovation. On the other hand we find that manufacturing has become commoditized and is no longer a key to profiting from innovation in final electronic products. Also, contrary to recent suggestions in the literature, we find no evidence of a causal link between product and industry architectures. Instead, there is a vast electronics “industry architecture” that can easily support product-level value chain configurations ranging from modular to integrated.

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Who profits from innovation in global value chains?: a study of the iPod and notebook PCs

As firms seek to improve coordination through the use of electronic interorganizational systems (IOS), open standards are becoming increasingly important. To better understand the process of standards diffusion, we investigate firms' migration from proprietary or less-open IOS (i.e., electronic data interchange or EDI) to open-standard IOS (i.e., the Internet). Theoretical work in economics suggests that network effects are a determinant of network adoption, yet the extant literature falls short of empirical testing of the theory. We develop a conceptual model that features network effects, expected benefits, and adoption costs as prominent antecedents. We examine the model on a large dataset of 1,394 firms. The empirical results demonstrate the significant impacts of network effects on open-standard IOS adoption. We find that adoption costs are a significant barrier to open-standard IOS adoption, but EDI users and nonusers treat this very differently: EDI users are much more sensitive to the costs of switching to the new standard. This finding illustrates that experience with older standards may create switching costs and make it difficult to shift to open and potentially better standards, a phenomenon called "excess inertia" in technology change. Further testing the underlying factors that contribute to network effects and adoption costs, we find that trading community influence is a key driver of network effects, while managerial complexity, as opposed to financial costs, is a key determinant of adoption costs. Overall we believe that this study, based on a rigorous empirical analysis of a unique international dataset, provides valuable insights into a set of key factors that influence standards diffusion.

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Migration to open-standard interorganizational systems: network effects, switching costs, and path dependency

Executives’ Perceptions of the Business Value of Information Technology: A Process-Oriented Approach Paul P. Tallon Kenneth L. Kraemer Vijay Gurbaxani Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations, Graduate School of Management, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-4650 (same address for all authors) Phone: (949) 824-7876 Fax: (949) 824-8091 email: PTallon@uci.edu authors’ biographies are given on the last page Working Paper #ITR-148 April 13, 2001 Acknowledgment: The authors wish to thank Chuck Rieger, Nancy Burchfield, Mary Driscoll, Shashi Karpur, Jim Sutter, Jim Ellis, Debora Dunkle, Nigel Melville, Ron Ramirez, the Guest Editors and anonymous reviewers of JMIS for their comments and suggestions. This research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center Program (CISE/CSS) and IBM Global Services to the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO) at the University of California, Irvine. Key Words: Business Value; Impacts of IT; IT Strategy; Value Chain

Kenneth L. Kraemer

Papers

Executives' perceptions of the business value of information technology: a process-oriented approach

Electronic business adoption by European firms: a cross-country assessment of the facilitators and inhibitors

Who profits from innovation in global value chains?: a study of the iPod and notebook PCs

Migration to open-standard interorganizational systems: network effects, switching costs, and path dependency

Executives' Perceptions of the Business Value of Information Technology: A Process-Oriented Approach