Placement
Students on the Job Market
Students on the Job Market
Information will be updated throughout the summer and fall of 2020.
Technology & Operations Management
Frank Nagle
Abstract:
- The Digital Commons: Tragedy or Opportunity? The Effect of Crowdsourced Digital Goods on Innovation and Economic Growth
- In the digital world, public and crowdsourced goods are essentially infinite. Although this solves the classic tragedy of the commons problem, the widespread digital availability of goods that were once scarce results in a destruction of value as measured by traditional means. In this dissertation, I examine this phenomenon to better understand how digitization is weakening the boundaries of the firm while enabling innovation and economic growth. In paper 1 (w/ Shane Greenstein) we explore the impact of "digital dark matter", digital goods and services that are non-pecuniary and effectively limitless inputs into production, on GDP measurement. We find that one such good, the Apache web server, leads to an underestimation of GDP by upwards of $12 billion. In paper 2 (my job market paper), I empirically measure the impact of non-pecuniary crowdsourced digital goods on firm productivity. Using data from a survey of technology use at nearly 2,000 firms over 10 years, I find that a 1% increase in the amount of non-pecuniary open source software used by a firm leads to a .075% increase in productivity. This translates to a $1.38 million increase in production output for the average firm in my sample. I use inverse probability weighting, instrumental variables, firm-fixed effects, and data on managerial quality from the World Management Survey to add support to a causal interpretation of these results. Paper 3 (w/ Elizabeth Altman and Michael Tushman) presents a conceptual argument for why technological progress and reductions in information costs are leading firms to increasingly engage with external digital communities in ways that alter traditional theories of how firms organize and innovate. Finally, in paper 4, I empirically examine how firm participation in such communities can enhance the absorptive capacity of the firm using a dataset on firm contributions to open source software projects.
Faculty Advisor(s):
S.Greenstein (Co-chair), M. Iansiti (Co-Chair), C. Baldwin, K. Lakhani, and F. Zhu