Abstract
What archetypes emerge from prominent episodes of product launches? This essay examines a set of episodes in information technology history that led to significant changes in industry ...leadership. It highlights that, in all of these instances, there is an example of a “visionary” archetype—an individual or a set of leaders who promulgate a unique view for addressing a business opportunity, which they use as they launch a new product. These archetypes are couched as insiders or outsiders depending on the firm’s status before the new product launch, and incumbent market leaders are insiders. The narrative arc is similar, as the visionary first encounters resistance and crises, must overcome challenges, and usually has to overcome skeptics via a product launch that gains market acceptance. However, the narratives of insiders and outsiders differ systematically based on their market position, leading to asymmetric approaches to market competition. This review stresses the importance of visionaries in industrial change brought about by product entry. It raises questions about integrating such narratives into the analysis of significant changes in market structure.
Organizations today can use both crowds and experts to produce knowledge. While prior work compares the accuracy of crowd-produced and expert-produced knowledge, we compare bias in these two models ...in the context of contested knowledge, which involves subjective, unverifiable, or controversial information. Using data from Encyclopedia Britannica, authored by experts, and Wikipedia, an encyclopedia produced by an online community, we compare the slant and bias of pairs of articles on identical topics of U.S. politics. Our slant measure is less (more) than zero when an article leans toward Democratic (Republican) viewpoints, while bias is the absolute value of the slant. We find that Wikipedia articles are more slanted toward Democratic views than are Britannica articles, as well as more biased. The difference in bias between a pair of articles decreases with more revisions. The bias on a per word basis hardly differs between the sources because Wikipedia articles tend to be longer than Britannica articles. These results highlight the pros and cons of each knowledge production model, help identify the scope of the empirical generalization of prior studies comparing the information quality of the two production models, and offer implications for organizations managing crowd-based knowledge production.
The last decade has seen a strident public debate about the principle of "net neutrality." The economic literature has focused on two definitions of net neutrality. The most basic definition of net ...neutrality is to prohibit payments from content providers to internet service providers; this situation we refer to as a one-sided pricing model, in contrast with a two-sided pricing model in which such payments are permitted. Net neutrality may also be defined as prohibiting prioritization of traffic, with or without compensation. The research program then is to explore how a net neutrality rule would alter the distribution of rents and the efficiency of outcomes. After describing the features of the modern internet and introducing the key players, (internet service providers, content providers, and customers), we summarize insights from some models of the treatment of internet traffic, framing issues in terms of the positive economic factors at work. Our survey provides little support for the bold and simplistic claims of the most vociferous supporters and detractors of net neutrality. The economic consequences of such policies depend crucially on the precise policy choice and how it is implemented. The consequences further depend on how long-run economic trade-offs play out; for some of them, there is relevant experience in other industries to draw upon, but for others there is no experience and no consensus forecast.
The Internet and Local Wages: A Puzzle Forman, Chris; Goldfarb, Avi; Greenstein, Shane
The American economic review,
02/2012, Letnik:
102, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
How did the diffusion of the internet affect regional wage inequality? We examine the relationship between business investment in advanced internet technology and local variation in US wage growth ...between 1995 and 2000. We identify a puzzle. The internet is widespread, but the economic payoffs are not. Advanced internet technology is only associated with substantial wage growth in the 6 percent of counties that were already highly wealthy, educated, and populated and had IT-intensive industry. Advanced internet and wage growth appear unrelated elsewhere. Overall, advanced internet explains over half the difference in wage growth between already well-off counties and all others. JEL: J31, L86, O33, R11, R23
This study analyzes the role of co-invention in the creation of a platform for print-on-demand-clothing, or PODC. Co-invention is the invention of a new business process to complement new technology, ...and turn it into a valuable commercial service. PODC copies a design onto clothing with immaterial effect on the cost, and irrespective of the scale of the batch. In its modern form, PODC extends to more than two dozen different pieces of clothing and other items, enabling buyers to personalize clothing with any art. The digital printing machines used in PODC contain numerous technical inventions, while the electronic commerce platform contains the important business processes. The study examines a pioneering PODC platform from Threadless, and analyzes how this new platform emerged from a sequence of co-inventions. The study highlights the level of discretion given to graphic artists to foster trust with the platform, and it shows how a hierarchy of business process co-inventions overcame the coordination issues inherent in building a large scale and new multi-sided platform.
Online communities bring together participants from diverse backgrounds and often face challenges in aggregating their opinions. We infer lessons from the experience of individual contributors to ...Wikipedia articles about U.S. politics. We identify two factors that cause a tendency toward moderation in collective opinion: Either biased contributors contribute less, which shifts the composition of participants, or biased contributors moderate their own views. Our findings show that shifts in the composition of participants account for 80%–90% of the moderation in content. Contributors tend to contribute to articles with slants that are opposite their own views. Evidence suggests that encountering extreme contributors with an opposite slant plays an important role in triggering the composition shift and changing views. These findings suggest that collective intelligence becomes more trustworthy when mechanisms encourage confrontation between distinct viewpoints. They also suggest, cautiously, that managers who aspire to produce content “from all sides” should let the most biased contributors leave the collective conversation if they can be replaced with more moderate voices.
This paper was accepted by Anandhi Bharadwaj, information systems.
•Analyze the (mis)measurement of Apache's contribution to economic growth.•Illustrate why Internet research done in universities goes under-measured.•Analyzes a novel data set consisting of a 1% ...sample of all US web servers.•Apache is between 1.3 and 8.7% of stock of prepackaged software.•Illustrates the potential scale of the magnitude for mismeasurement is quite high.
Researchers have long hypothesized that research outputs from government, university, and private company R&D contribute to economic growth, but these contributions may be difficult to measure when they take a non-pecuniary form. The growth of networking devices and the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s magnified these challenges, as illustrated by the deployment of the descendent of the NCSA HTTPd server, otherwise known as Apache. This study asks whether this experience could produce measurement issues in standard productivity analysis, specifically, omission and attribution issues, and, if so, whether the magnitude is large enough to matter. The study develops and analyzes a novel data set consisting of a 1% sample of all outward-facing web servers used in the United States. We find that use of Apache potentially accounts for a mismeasurement of somewhere between $2 billion and $12 billion, which equates to between 1.3% and 8.7% of the stock of prepackaged software in private fixed investment in the United States and a very high rate of return to the original federal investment in the Internet. We argue that these findings point to a large potential undercounting of the rate of return from IT spillovers from the invention of the Internet. The findings also suggest a large potential undercounting of “digital dark matter” in general.
Is Wikipedia Biased? Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng
The American economic review,
05/2012, Letnik:
102, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This study empirically examines whether Wikipedia has a neutral point of view. It develops a method for measuring the slant of 28 thousand articles about US politics. In its earliest years, ...Wikipedia's political entries lean Democrat on average. The slant diminishes during Wikipedia's decade of experience. This change does not arise primarily from revision of existing articles. Most articles arrive with a slant, and most articles change only mildly from their initial slant. The overall slant changes due to the entry of articles with opposite slants, leading toward neutrality for many topics, not necessarily within specific articles. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
The diffusion of the Internet and digital technologies has enabled many organizations to use the open-content production model to produce and disseminate knowledge. While several prior studies have ...shown that the open-content production model can lead to high-quality output in the context of uncontroversial and verifiable information, it is unclear whether this production model will produce any desirable outcome when information is controversial, subjective, and unverifiable. We examine whether the open-content production model helps achieve a neutral point of view (NPOV) using data from Wikipedia’s articles on U.S. politics. Our null hypothesis builds on Linus’ Law, which argues that with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Our findings are consistent with a narrow interpretation of Linus’ Law, namely, a greater number of contributors to an article makes an article more neutral. No evidence supports a broad interpretation of Linus’ Law. Moreover, several empirical facts suggest the law does not shape many articles. The majority of articles receive little attention, and most articles change only mildly from their initial slant. Our study provides the first empirical evidence on the limit of Linus’ Law. While many organizations believe that they could improve their knowledge production by leveraging communities, we show that in the case of Wikipedia, there are aspects, such as NPOV, that the community does not always achieve successfully.
Competition to become one of several dominant mobile platforms is intense. Platforms compete for developers, who create applications which make the platform valuable for users. Why doesn't one form ...of platform governance emerge as superior? This essay will stress the reasons for differentiation and proposes a new argument linked to a platform's “hierarchy.” Hierarchical governance features can help at one moment but then get in the way at a later time. These arguments are illustrated by different approaches to platform governance taken by the major mobile platform sponsors of recent years.
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