Digital Initiative Discussion & Symposium (DIDS)
Digital Initiative Discussion & Symposium (DIDS)
Digital Initiative Discussion & Symposium (DIDS)
May 11-12, 2017 Room 107, Cotting HouseMay 11
12:00-1:15 | Lunch |
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1:15-2:15 | Session I: Woody PowellClick and Mortar: Organizations on the WebDiscussant: Michael Tushman Abstract: The webpages of organizations are both a form of representation and a type of narrative. They entertain, persuade, express a point of view, and provide a means to organize collective action and economic exchange. Increasingly, webpages are the primary point of access between an organization and its environment. An organization’s online presence offers a major new source of rich information about organizations. In this paper, we develop three perspectives on websites from an organizational point of view: as identity projects, tools, and relational maps. We draw on data from the online and offline presences of "brick and mortar" nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area to both illustrate how a digital transformation shaped these organizations and identify a host of new methods that can be used to study organizations using webpages. Finally, we reflect on both the strengths of these new sources of data as well as possible limitations and conclude with theoretical implications for organizational scholars. |
2:15-2:45 | Break |
2:45-3:45 |
Session II: Amir GoldbergEnculturation Trajectories: Language, Cultural Adaptation, and Individual Outcomes in OrganizationsDiscussant: Jeff Polzer Abstract: How do people adapt to organizational culture, and what are the consequences for their outcomes in the organization? These fundamental questions about culture have previously been examined using self-report measures, which are subject to reporting bias, rely on coarse cultural categories defined by researchers, and provide only static snapshots of cultural fit. By contrast, we develop an interactional language use model that overcomes these limitations and opens new avenues for theoretical development about the dynamics of organizational culture. We trace the enculturation trajectories of employees in a midsized technology firm based on analyses of 10.24 million internal emails. Our language-based model of changing cultural fit (1) predicts individual attainment; (2) reveals distinct patterns of adaptation for employees who exit voluntarily, exit involuntarily, and remain employed; (3) demonstrates that rapid early cultural adaptation reduces the risk of involuntary, but not voluntary, exit; and (4) finds that a decline in cultural fit for individuals who had successfully enculturated portends voluntary departure. |
3:45-4:15 | Break |
4:15-5:15 | Session III: Lorin Hitt and Lynn WuData Analytics Skills, Innovation and Firm ProductivityDiscussant: Feng Zhu Abstract: We examine the relationship between data analytics capabilities and innovation using detailed firm-level data. To measure innovative activity, we utilize a survey on process- and innovation- oriented business practices, and we use patent data to analyze the innovative output and characteristics of firms. We find that data analytics capabilities are more likely to be present and are more valuable in firms that are oriented around process improvement and that innovate by recombining existing technologies; data analytics skills have no effect on or are possibly negatively related to value in firms that focus on generating creative and truly novel innovations. We interpret these findings as consistent with data analytics skills being complementary to the exploitation rather than exploration strategies as described in the technology strategy literature. |
6:00-8:00 | Reception and DinnerMeredith Room, Spangler Center |
May 12
8:30-9:00 | Continental Breakfast |
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9:00-10:00 | Session IV: Mary BennerTechnological Change and the Rise of "Niche" Strategies in the Motion Picture IndustryDiscussant: Hong Luo Abstract: Digitization has transformed media industries – such as music, books, movies, and television – by reducing production costs and facilitating the creation of distribution channels that unlock bottlenecks. In motion pictures, the ecosystem has seen the development of new distribution platforms such as Amazon, Netflix, and iTunes that can present more choices than traditional distribution channels, such as theaters. Much recent literature indicates that consumers facing a "long tail" of product choices facilitated by online distribution shift their purchases toward existing niche products. Even so, other research exhorts creators of new content to focus on large-scale, potential blockbuster products. Research has not explored whether producers do or should shift their new production effort toward producing new niche products aimed at smaller audiences, now reachable through new distribution channels. We explore whether digitization induces motion picture producers to pursue new opportunities targeting smaller audiences with niche products. Using a unique dataset on US motion pictures features created from 1980 to 2016, we study 1) whether motion picture producers increase their focus on ‘niche’ strategies, i.e. the production of movies not intended as blockbusters that are targeted at smaller audiences and 2) which types of producers create these niche products. |
10:00-10:15 |
Break |
10:15-11:15 | Session V: Erik Brynjolfsson and Avi GannamaneniEstimating Changes in Well-being using Massive Online Choice ExperimentsDiscussant: Chris Stanton Abstract: In principle, changes in consumer surplus (compensating expenditure) provide a superior measure of changes in consumer well-being than GDP and metrics derived from it, like productivity, especially for digital goods. In practice, consumer surplus has been difficult to measure. We demonstrate the potential of massively scalable online Single Binary Discrete Choice experiments for addressing this issue. These experiments provide a measure of consumers’ willingness to accept compensation for losing access to various digital goods and thereby estimate the changes in consumer surplus from these goods. Drawing on several hundred thousand online experiments, our results indicate that digital goods have created substantial gains in well-being which are largely missed by conventional measure of GDP and productivity, and suggest that our approach can be scaled up to a broader set of goods and services. Two limitations of our methods are that they are much less precise than changes in GDP and they suffer from hypothetical bias. We show how much of an improvement in precision can be achieved with larger sample sizes and demographic controls and we document the direction and magnitude of hypothetical bias by conducting incentive compatible experiments with a smaller group of subjects. By periodically querying a large, representative sample of goods and services, including those which are not priced in existing markets, changes in consumer surplus and other new measures of well-being derived from these online choice experiments have the potential for providing cost-effective supplements to existing national income and product accounts. |
11:15-11:30 | Break |
11:20 - 12:30 | Session VI: Ajay AgrawalExploring the Impact of Artificial Intelligence: Prediction versus JudgmentDiscussant: Dan Gross Abstract: Based on recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), we examine what type of human labour will be a substitute versus a complement to emerging technologies. We argue that these recent developments reduce the costs of providing a particular set of tasks – prediction tasks. Prediction about uncertain states of the world is an input into decision-making. We show that prediction allows riskier decisions to be taken and this is its impact on observed productivity although it could also increase the variance of outcomes as well. We consider the role of human judgment in decision-making as prediction technology improves. Judgment is exercised when the objective function for a particular set of decisions cannot be described (i.e., coded). However, we demonstrate that better prediction impacts the returns to different types of judgment in opposite ways. Hence, not all human judgment will be a complement to AI. Finally, we explore what will happen when AI prediction learns to predict the judgment of humans. |
12:30 | Lunch and adjourn |