At any given time, I have a half dozen major research projects underway. Currently, my time is focused on:
- Information Technology, Productivity and Organization: Examining how complementary organizational practices affect the value of IT investments. Also working on measuring the size and economic impact of information technology-related intangible assets (collaborators: Erik Brynjolfsson, Adam Saunders, Sonny Tambe, David Fitoussi)
- Information Technology Externalities: This project examines the evidence for spillovers between firms that invest in IT and other firms that are linked to them in some way (supply chain, industry competition, labor mobility). We are especially interested in characterizing how IT-related process knowledge flows among firms through worker mobility, and the implications of the mobility of IT workers more generally. This work is a collaboration between Wharton and an Online Job Service provider. (collaborators: Sonny Tambe)
- Value of Information Technology Investments in Healthcare: I am part of a collaborative project empirically studying how IT affects hospital performance as measured by quality and cost efficiency. This work is a collaboration between Wharton and Pricewaterhousecoopers consulting (collaborators: Nick Beard, Mike Housman, Kinga Elo)
- Economics and Operational Implications of Online Customer Self-Service: This is an NSF funded project to better understand the use and economic impact of self-service technology, especially Internet self-service. We are especially interested in the role of customer co-production ability ("customer efficiency") and the impact of online self-service channels on the demand for other service channels (collaborators: Mei Xue, Pei-Yu Chen, Patrick Harker)
- Product Variety and Information Technology: This work examines how information technology facilitates greater product variety and the implications for operations, performance and strategy. Our novel contribution here is a firm-level measure of variety using trademark counts (collaborators: Gordon Gao, Gerard Cachon)