Organizational Unit:
Scheller College of Business
Scheller College of Business
Permanent Link
Research Organization Registry ID
Description
Previous Names
Parent Organization
Parent Organization
Organizational Unit
Includes Organization(s)
Organizational Unit
ArchiveSpace Name Record
Publication Search Results
Now showing
1 - 5 of 5
-
ItemIT-enabled business practices: Empirical investigations of productivity and innovation(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-07-26) Angle, Patricia C.My dissertation centers on the impact of information technology (IT) investments on business processes. I seek to understand the way organizations use software to share information with partners in trade and facilitate innovation. Information-sharing IT and process innovation are complementary under the right circumstances, and understanding why and how the strategic use of software impacts organizations has wide-ranging implications, from supply-chain structure to understanding the contribution of the manufacturing sector to the national economy. The first chapter of my dissertation uses proprietary Census data to investigate the impact of e-selling on total factor productivity (TFP). I find that although large plants see a TFP increase related to e-selling, small plants do not. This highlights the need to understand economies of scale related to IT within organizations. The second chapter of my dissertation is an investigation into complementarities between IT and a firm’s research and development (R&D) efforts. While there has been considerable attention paid to IT as a complement to firm capabilities, there is less work examining complementarities between IT and other inputs to innovation. This research represents a novel investigation into the relationship between IT investments and a firm’s innovative strategy.
-
ItemEssays on platform ecosystems(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-07-19) Venkataraman, VijayaraghavanThere has been a tremendous increase in the number and variety of ecosystems. Extant literature has paid more attention to platform owners within ecosystems. In this dissertation, I focus on complementors and try to understand their capabilities and strategies. First, I review the literature and summarize existing research that spans across the three phases of the ecosystem namely nascent, growth and technological change. I highlight some of the gaps in existing research, especially those concerning the nature and role of complementors within the ecosystem. I use empirical studies based on the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Platform Ecosystem to address some of these gaps. More specifically, in one study, I look at the complementor strategy of multihoming and explore the role played by complementor capabilities in terms of their human capital and ecosystem learning facilitated by the complementor’s prior platform partnership in multihoming. In another study, I examine the relationship between platform level competition and complementor performance. When an incumbent platform faces competition from an entrant platform, it tends to engage in steering activities that are aimed at supporting its complementors and dissuading them from joining the rival platform. I analyze the potential role of steering in complementor performance and its differential impact based on the complementors’s human capital profile.
-
ItemConsumer adoption and usage behavior on the mobile internet(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-07-09) Xu, JiaoThere has been little understanding of how consumers adopt and use the mobile Internet. This dissertation seeks to bridge this gap in prior literature by focusing on consumers’ cross-platform consumption behavior on mobile devices. The first study of this dissertation addresses how the adoption of mobile applications influences the use of corresponding mobile websites. Pseudo-panel analysis based on repeated cross-sectional data suggests that the introduction of a mobile app by a major national media company leads to a significant increase in demand at the corresponding mobile news website. In addition, it reports that this effect is greater for consumers with higher appreciation for concentrated news content, with stronger propensity for a particular political viewpoint, and with fewer time constraints. The results are consistent with the interpretation that adoption of a provider’s news app stimulates corresponding mobile news website visits. The second study of this dissertation examines whether the quality of local fixed-line Internet service influences mobile Internet adoption and usage. An empirical analysis shows that local fixed-line Internet speed relates negatively to mobile Internet adoption and usage; if the local fixed-line connection is insufficient, consumers tend to get online through their mobile phones. Further, better local mobile Internet speed increases the likelihood of adopting and using the mobile Internet. Neither fixed-line nor mobile Internet speed has significant impacts on mobile-specific offline services such as taking photos or videos. In some circumstances, competition between the two platforms is stronger, such as among younger consumers and those living in areas with lower fixed-line Internet speeds.
-
ItemTechnology support and demand for cloud infrastructure services: the role of service providers(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-08-20) Retana Solano, German F.Service providers have long recognized that their customers play a vital role in the service delivery process since they are not only recipients but also producers, or co-producers, of the service delivered. Moreover, in the particular context of self-service technology (SST) offerings, it is widely recognized that customers’ knowledge, skills and abilities in co-producing the service are key determinants of the services’ adoption and usage. However, despite the importance of customers’ capabilities, prior research has not yet paid much attention to the mechanisms by which service providers can influence them and, in turn, how the providers’ efforts affect customers’ use of the service. This dissertation addresses research questions associated with the role of a provider’s technology support and education in influencing customer use of an SST, namely public cloud computing infrastructure services. The unique datasets used to answer these research questions were collected from one of the major global providers in the cloud infrastructure services industry. This research context offers an excellent opportunity to study the role of technology support since, when adapting the standardized and commoditized components of the cloud service to their individual needs, customers may face important co-production costs that can be mitigated by the provider’s assistance. Specifically, customers must configure their computing servers and deploy their software applications on their own, relying on their own capabilities. Moreover, the cloud’s offering of on-demand computing servers through a fully pay-per-use model allows us to directly observe variation in the actual use customers make of the service. The first study of this dissertation examines how varying levels of technology support, which differ in the level of participation and assistance of the provider in customers’ service co-production process, influence the use that customers make of the service. The study matches and compares 20,179 firms that used the service between March 2009 and August 2012, and who over time accessed one of the two levels of support available: full and basic. Using fixed effects panel data models and a difference-in-difference identification strategy, we find that customers who have access to full support or accessed it in the past use (i.e., consume) more of the service than customers who have only accessed basic support. Moreover, the provider’s involvement in the co-production process is complementary with firm size in the sense that larger firms use more of the service than smaller ones if they upgrade from basic to full support. Finally, the provider’s co-participation through full support also has a positive influence on the effectiveness with which buyers make use of the service. Firms that access full support are more likely to deploy computing architectures that leverage on the cloud’s advanced features. The second study examines the value of early proactive education, which is defined as any provider-initiated effort to increase its customers’ service co-production related knowledge and skills immediately after service adoption. The study analyzes the outcome of a field experiment executed by the provider between October and November 2011, during which 366 randomly-selected customers out of 2,673 customers that adopted during the field experiment period received early proactive education treatment. The treatment consisted in a short phone call followed up by a support ticket through which the provider offered initial guidance on how to use the basic features of the service. We use survival analysis (i.e., hazard models) to compare the treatment’s effect on customer retention, and find that it reduces by half the number of customers who leave the service offering during the first week. We also use count data models to examine the treatment’s effect on customers’ demand for technology support, and find that the treated customers ask about 19.55% fewer questions during the first week of their lifetimes than the controls.
-
ItemThe implications of incumbent intellectual property strategies for open source software success and commercialization(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012-07-03) Wen, WenThere has been little understanding of how the existence and exercise of formal intellectual property rights (IPR) such as patents influence the direction of OSS innovation. This dissertation seeks to bridge this gap in prior literature by focusing on two closely related topics. First, it investigates how OSS adoption and production are influenced by IPR enforcement exercised by proprietary incumbents. It suggests that when an IPR enforcement action is filed, user interest and developer activity will be negatively affected in two types of related OSS projects--those that display technology overlap with the litigated OSS and business projects that are specific to a focal litigated platform. The empirical analyses based on data from SourceForge.net strongly support the hypotheses. Second, it examines the impact of royalty-free patent pools contributed by OSS-friendly incumbents on OSS product entry by start-up firms. It argues that increases in the size of the OSS patent pool related to a software segment will facilitate OSS entry by start-up firms into the same segment; further, the marginal effect of the pool on OSS entry will be especially large in software segments where the cumulativeness of innovation is high or where patent ownership in a segment is concentrated. These hypotheses are empirically tested through examining the impacts of a major OSS patent pool--the Patent Commons, established by IBM and a few others in 2005--on OSS entry by 2,054 start-up firms from 1999 to 2009. The empirical results largely support these hypotheses and are robust to adding a variety of controls as well as to GMM instrumental variables estimation.