nep-ict New Economics Papers
on Information and Communication Technologies
Issue of 2015‒11‒01
ten papers chosen by
Walter Frisch
Universität Wien

  1. Ubiquitous digital technologies and spatial structure: a preliminary analysis By Emmanouil Tranos; Yannis Ioannides
  2. ICT adoption factors in medical hospitals: a European perspective and focus on The Netherlands By Marina Van Geenhuizen; Sander Faber
  3. Investment, Subsidies, and Universal Service: Broadband Internet in the United States By Kyle Wilson;
  4. Towards a Digital Attribution Model: Measuring the Impact of Display Advertising on Online Consumer Behavior By Anindya Ghose; Vilma Todri
  5. Change in access after digitization: Ethnographic collections in Wikipedia By Trilce Navarrete; Karol J. Borowiecki
  6. Digitization of Heritage Collections as Indicator of Innovation By Karol J. Borowiecki; Trilce Navarrete
  7. Exploring city social interaction ties in the big data era: Evidence based on location-based social media data from China By Wenjie Wu; Jianghao Wang
  8. A Study Of Information Communication Technology (ICT) Competency for Students Of Teaching Profession By Wijit Chalopatham; Warintorn Phon-Noi; Jaruwan Ployduangrat
  9. Designing web surveys for the multi-device internet By de Puumala, M.A.
  10. Risk taking and information aggregation in groups By Spiro Bougheas; Jeroen Nieboer; Martin Sefton

  1. By: Emmanouil Tranos; Yannis Ioannides
    Abstract: This paper sheds light on the potential effect that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) might generate on cities and spatial structure. The extensive theoretical discussion and speculation on how cities and geography might be affected by digital technologies, which took place before the actual adoption of such technologies, have not been coupled by in depth empirical analysis to verify early predictions. The few examples of such studies, which approached such research questions both analytically and empirically, were insightful, but their results were to a certain extend contradictory. Most importantly, these studies took place before digital technologies such as the Internet had matured. Nowadays, these technologies have been adopted widely and we are thus in a better position to approach empirically such a research question and quantify the relation between ICTs and spatial structure. The preliminary empirical analysis presented in this paper suggests significant causal effects that ICT penetration generates on spatial structure. Internet and mobile phone penetration in non-EU/NAFTA countries have led to more spatially dispersed population and more uniform city size distribution. However, such effects are not present in non-EU/NAFTA countries, a phenomenon which might be related to the maturity of urban systems and advanced state of technological adoption in those countries. The proposed methodology, which relies on extensive econometric investigations with a number of models includes 2SLS regressions with instrumented variables, resulted to estimations which are robust against potential endogeneity problems.
    Keywords: ICTs; spatial structure; zipf law
    JEL: O18 R29 R12 C23
    Date: 2015–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa15p1329&r=ict
  2. By: Marina Van Geenhuizen; Sander Faber
    Abstract: The Netherlands can be seen as one of the best healthcare systems in Europe. However, ICT application in hospitals in this country is somewhat behind the Nordic countries, with many hospitals ?stuck? in the stage of search and ?being interested? without a subsequent move to testing and actual implementation. This situation contradicts the expected gains of ICT use in making healthcare more effective and efficient, and making it less expensive, and is difficult to understand given the fact that eHealth has been on the European Commission Information Society?s policy agenda for more than a decade. With respect to Europe, there is a considerable variability in adoption levels, with Nordic countries like Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Estonia at the highest level of adoption and countries in Eastern Europe and Greece staying behind at the lowest level. To better understand these differences, we develop a model of organizational adoption of ICT in hospitals and explore this model using a database of 30 hospitals in the Netherlands. Some of the factors in the model inhibit characteristics that could be different between countries, in terms of finance (budgets), overall ICT use and national culture. In the empirical part, we test the validity of some constructs and use structural equation modeling. Not surprisingly, size of the hospital plays a role, while organizational readiness and support of the top management of the hospital have an important influence as well, partially directly and indirectly. Outcomes of the analysis also include non-linear influences on adoption and potentially reversed causality in particular stages of the adoption process. The study provides the following new elements: a more detailed look at adoption (more stages compared to previous research), design and testing of various constructs concerning adoption, exploration of an extended TOE (technological, organizational and environmental) framework in a hospital setting, and use of a specific PLS-SEM to identify non-linear relations in a relatively small sample. The paper concludes with a summary of interpretations and with some suggestions for improvement of eHealth policies, given the influence of hospital size, organizational readiness and management support on ICT adoption, and a different national context within Europe.
    Keywords: ICT; adoption; hospitals; readiness; management; The Netherlands; Europe
    JEL: D83 I18 O32
    Date: 2015–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa15p590&r=ict
  3. By: Kyle Wilson (University of Arizona, Department of Economics, McClelland Hall 401, PO Box 210108, Tucson, AZ 85721-0108);
    Abstract: Access to the internet is critical for participating in modern society, yet, 17% of Americans lack access to broadband internet, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). A key objective of the FCC is to promote policies that advance the availability of quality telecommunications services across the United States. To that end, the FCC has recently secured funding to provide subsidies to internet service providers on a massive scale, and has been given considerable flexibility in the distribution of these funds. The aim of this paper is to identify the determinants of internet service providers' decisions about entry into new markets and upgrades to existing infrastructure, and to use this information to provide policy recommendations about how to target subsidies in order to best accomplish the longstanding goal of Universal Service. To do this, I develop a dynamic model, which encapsulates potential entrants' decisions to enter new markets as a low-speed or high-speed provider, as well as incumbents' decisions to upgrade their infrastructure, maintain service, or exit markets. I then estimate this model using data from the National Broadband Map, a recent initiative to precisely track availability of broadband internet across the United States. Then, I use this model to perform counterfactuals, which generate predictions of firm behaviors under a variety of proposed subsidy structures.
    Keywords: broadband internet; subsidies
    JEL: L13 L96 L98
    Date: 2015–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:net:wpaper:1509&r=ict
  4. By: Anindya Ghose (Department of Operations, Information, and Management Sciences, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, 44 West 4th Street, New York 10012, NY, USA); Vilma Todri (Department of Operations, Information, and Management Sciences, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, 44 West 4th Street, New York 10012, NY, USA)
    Abstract: The increasing availability of individual-level data has raised the standards for measurability and accountability in digital advertising. Using a massive individual-level data set, our paper captures the effectiveness of display advertising across a wide range of consumer behaviors. Two unique features of our data set that distinguish this paper from prior work are: (i) the information on the actual viewability of impressions and (ii) the duration of exposure to the display advertisements, both at the individual-user level. Employing a natural experiment enabled by our setting, we use difference-in-differences and corresponding matching methods as well as instrumental variable techniques to control for unobservable and observable confounders. We empirically demonstrate that mere exposure to display advertising can increase users’ propensity to search for the brand and the corresponding product; consumers engage both in active search exerting effort to gather information through search engines as well as through direct visits to the advertiser’s website, and in passive search using information sources that arrive exogenously, such as future display ads. We also find statistically and economically significant effect of display advertising on increasing consumers’ propensity to make a purchase. Furthermore, we find that the advertising performance is amplified up to four times when consumers are targeted earlier in the purchase funnel path and that the longer the duration of exposure to display advertising, the more likely the consumers are to engage in direct search behaviors (e.g., direct visits) rather than indirect ones (e.g., search engine inquiries). We also study the effects of various types of display advertising (e.g., prospecting, retargeting, affiliate targeting, video advertising, etc.) and the different goals they achieve. Our framework for evaluating display advertising effectiveness constitutes a stepping stone towards causally addressing the digital attribution problem.
    Keywords: Online Advertising; Big Data; Analytics; Display Advertising; Advertising Effectiveness; Digital Attribution; Natural Experiment
    JEL: L86 M37
    Date: 2015–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:net:wpaper:1515&r=ict
  5. By: Trilce Navarrete (Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark, Odense,Denmark); Karol J. Borowiecki (Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark, Odense,Denmark)
    Abstract: The raison d’être of memory institutions revolves around collecting, preserving and giving access to heritage collections. Increasingly, access takes place in social networked markets characterized by communities of users that serve to select and rank content to facilitate reuse. Publication of heritage in such digital medium transforms patterns of consumption. We performed a quantitative analysis on the access to a museum collection and compared results before and after publication on Wikimedia. Analysis of the difference in access showed two main results: first, access to collections increased substantially online. From a selection of the most viewed objects, access grew from an average of 156,000 onsite visitors per year (or 15.5 million in a century) to over 1.5 million views online per year (or 7.9 million in five years). Second, we find a long tail in both mediums, where 8% of objects were exhibited onsite and 11% of available objects online were used in Wikipedia articles (representing 1% of the total collection). We further document differences in consumer preference for type of object, favouring 3D onsite and 2D online, as well as topic and language preference, favouring Wikipedia articles about geography and in English. Online publication is hence an important complement to onsite exhibitions to increase access to collections. Results shed light on online consumption of heritage content by consumers who may not necessarily visit heritage sites.
    Keywords: Heritage consumption, Museums, Digital heritage, Access, Exhibition history, Wikipedia
    JEL: L31 D12 N30 Z11
    Date: 2015–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cue:wpaper:awp-10-2015&r=ict
  6. By: Karol J. Borowiecki (Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark, Odense,Denmark); Trilce Navarrete (Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark, Odense,Denmark)
    Abstract: Heritage institutions house cultural and research content, which is the key source to stimulate innovation. Despite the potential, heritage collections are mostly inaccessible via digital mediums. We analyze the macro, meso and micro conditions of heritage organizations across Europe to identify the key determinants that foster innovation as reflected by the share of collection digitization and online publication. We find that organizations respond positively to an environment of high consumer digital literacy and sustainable resource allocation that enables slack, skilled staff and long-term strategic planning. Innovation is thus, in fact, enhanced by digital literacy from both producers as well as consumers.
    Keywords: innovation; digitization; heritage collections; cultural institution
    JEL: O3 Z1
    Date: 2015–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cue:wpaper:awp-08-2015&r=ict
  7. By: Wenjie Wu; Jianghao Wang
    Abstract: Location-based social media data is, increasingly, an important facilitator of exploring the movement of goods and people in and between countries across the globe. Typical examples include Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare. As with all social media data outputs, the fundamental value of location-based social media data is for sensing users? space?time trajectories, and thus, makes social media data a new platform for understanding business and social interactions in the spatial context. In large developing and emerging economies with massive social media users via computers and mobile phones, real-time ?geo-tagged? human mobility information from social media data sources are clearly potentially large. In these settings, cyberspaces are often built and expanded with the explicit aim of stimulating digital socioeconomic activities and balancing regional disparities. However, despite intense policy and public enthusiasms, there is virtually no direct evidence on exploring the configuration of urban network patterns by using social media users? mobility flows within a large developing country context. The scarcity of empirical evidence is not surprising, given that mining location-based social media data faces serious identification challenges. First, location-based social media data, as a type of big data resource, are often featured by the dynamic, massive information generated by billions of users across space. In truth, despite of the recent development of intensive-computational geographic information system (GIS) modeling programs, social media data with precise individual-level location information is still extremely large to proceed by using the GIS techniques at multiple geographical scales. Furthermore, conventional GIS-based computational methods cannot directly read the unstructured social media datasets (e.g. words, pictures, videos). Additional big data mining methods are often needed to transform social media data information from unstructured data formats to structured, and ready-to-use spatial datasets. In this paper, we tackle these problems by analysing the configuration of intercity connection patterns in China to provide new evidence to the applications of location-based social media data in urban and regional studies. Our examination of changes in human mobility patterns by months by city-pairs throughout China by months involves many potential stages of big data mining analysis. We stratify cities by core-periphery urban systems, by regions and by calendar months, finding that human mobility flows are not distributed evenly over time and across space. We find larger human mobility flows around the Chinese New Year month and the summer months. Our evidence suggests the significantly heterogeneity patterns of core-periphery urban systems as reflected from real-time human mobility flows. As a baseline, this paper is?for the first time in the literature?to comprehensively measure urban network patterns at a detailed spatial degree (the city-pair level) based on location-based social media data from a large developing country context.
    Keywords: Big data; Social media; Urban network; China
    JEL: P25
    Date: 2015–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa15p798&r=ict
  8. By: Wijit Chalopatham (Srinakharinwirot University,Prasanpimt Demonstration School (Elementary)); Warintorn Phon-Noi (Faculty of Education, Srinakharinwirot University); Jaruwan Ployduangrat (Faculty of Education, Srinakharinwirot University)
    Abstract: This research aims to study the performance the information and communications technology (ICT) for teacher students . The the data collection information from education research papers related to and interviews depth technical expertise in the ICT. To determine the physical the ICT for teacher students. The results showed that performance of the information and communications technology (ICT) for teacher students are offered.1 ) contain substantive knowledge of architecture or architectural information , communication technology, the design of the course on the Web. 2 ) skills include knowledge, to create the product knowledge, storage and night knowledge , knowledge exchange and collaboration with others ,integrating knowledge and to communicate with others. 3 ) Attitudes toward the information and communications technology include the desire to know .The regular class activities,to create the creation portfolio using information and communications technology (ICT) , trying to solve the problem occurs, have confidence in the use of information and communications technology (ICT). The results of the research will use the information in curriculum development to develop teacher students .
    Keywords: Information Communication Technology, Competency for Students Of Teaching Profession, Students Of Teaching Profession, Engineering, teachers students, ICT competency
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sek:iacpro:3105290&r=ict
  9. By: de Puumala, M.A. (Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management)
    Abstract: The rise of the mobile internet has rapidly changed the landscape for fielding web surveys. The devices that respondents use to take a web survey vary greatly in size and user interface. This diversity in the interaction between survey and respondent makes it challenging to design a web survey for the general public and raises various questions for survey researchers. Which strategy should one choose when designing web surveys for the multi-device internet? Should the<br/>layout be adapted for the various devices and if so, what effect will this have on survey outcomes and data quality? What is the most user friendly way to present survey questions on mobile devices? This thesis addresses these and other questions on the instrumental (visual) design of web surveys for the multi-device internet. In five empirical studies, the thesis discusses how the modern online respondent can be engaged on multiple device types.<br/>
    Date: 2015
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tiu:tiutis:19e4d446-a62b-4a95-8691-8e75eb69b611&r=ict
  10. By: Spiro Bougheas; Jeroen Nieboer; Martin Sefton
    Abstract: We report a controlled laboratory experiment examining risk-taking and information aggregation in groups facing a common risk. The experiment allows us to examine how subjects respond to new information, in the form of both privately observed signals and signals reported from others. We find that a considerable number of subjects exhibit ‘reverse confirmation bias’: they place less weight on information from others that agrees with their private signal and more weight on conflicting information. We also find a striking degree of consensus when subjects make decisions on behalf of the group under a random dictatorship procedure. Reverse confirmation bias and the incidence of consensus are considerably reduced when group members can share signals but not communicate.
    Keywords: Group behaviour; teams; decision making; risk; experiment
    JEL: C91 C92 D71 D80
    Date: 2015
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:64085&r=ict

This nep-ict issue is ©2015 by Walter Frisch. It is provided as is without any express or implied warranty. It may be freely redistributed in whole or in part for any purpose. If distributed in part, please include this notice.
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