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on Information and Communication Technologies |
| By: | Tirziu, Andreea-Maria; Vrabie, Catalin |
| Abstract: | In a country where nearly half the population lives in rural areas, it is difficult to link concepts such as smart cities, Internet of Things to the local government’s priority list. However, lately there have been numerous initiatives to improve access to information using ICT in the rural communities as well. The purpose of this article is not to exhaustively measure the already adopted means, but merely to provide a series of items retrieved as barriers to ICT projects meant to develop these communities. Following the studies conducted so far (in Romania there are about 2,700 communes – the lowest administrative entities of our country), it was observed that the digital divide is found in 100% of these areas. At the urban level – especially in the big cities, pilot projects for developing digital literacy among the elder population had a relatively high success. Such programs have been initiated at the level of the communes whose living standard is higher (the ones that are located near large cities). Their successes, though certainly less visible than in the urban communities, are noteworthy. Most such programs have targeted educational and health fields. The article we propose aims to show these programs’ implementation degree in Romania, providing as examples the most successful cases that help the social innovation process. The intention with which we start this study is to create a list of objectives that the initiators of these programs have to take into account during the preparation of those programs. |
| Keywords: | living labs, social innovation, rural areas |
| JEL: | O35 |
| Date: | 2017–05–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:79868&r=ict |
| By: | Netsanet Haile (Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea); Jörn Altmann (Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea) |
| Abstract: | Within a closed ecosystem, end-users cannot interoperate with other platforms or port their software and data easily without a cost for interface integration or data re-formatting. The customers of these closed software service platforms are locked-in. Potential customers, who are aware of this lock-in issue, are hesitant to adopt a closed software service platform, slowing down the wide deployment of the software service platform. This paper applies an economic perspective to investigate the value creation for providers and users at different levels of interoperability. For the analysis, a value creation model for software service platforms within a software service ecosystem has been developed. Simulations of the value creation model show that, even if investments in interoperability and portability are aimed at addressing user requirements, their impact also drives the providers’ profitability. Furthermore, emerging providers require investing more than market leading providers, as they have less power to set de facto standards. The simulation results also show that there is an optimal level of investments, with respect to profit and return on investments. Overall, from these results, platform providers cannot only obtain an understanding on how investments in interoperability and portability impact cost, enable cost-effective service integration, and create value, but also design new strategies for optimizing investments. |
| Keywords: | Cloud Computing, Software Service Platform, Interoperability, Portability, Value Creation Model, Computational Economics, Simulation, Value Analysis, Net Present Value, Return On Investments, Investment Assessment. |
| JEL: | C15 D24 D46 D85 E22 L86 O31 |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:snv:dp2009:2017136&r=ict |
| By: | Giorgio Canarella (University of Nevada, Las Vegas); Stephen M. Miller (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) |
| Abstract: | Why do some firms grow faster than others? This question has become the focus of a large number of empirical studies in industrial organization, strategic management, and entrepreneurship since the publications of Gibrat (1931) and Penrose (1959). Using an unbalanced panel data set of 85 U.S. information and communication technology (ICT) firms that survived over the period from 1990 to 2013, we examine the effect of firm size, agency costs, R&D investments, capital structure, profitability, and the Great Recession of 2007-2009 on firm growth. Adopting the two-step, system, generalized-method-of-moments estimator for linear dynamic panel models (Blundell and Bond, 1998), we document that growth in the ICT industry is not stochastic, as predicted by Gibrat (1931), but driven by systematic factors. We find compelling evidence that in the ICT industry: (i) firm growth exhibits positive persistence, which endorses the controversial "success-breeds-success" evolutionary hypothesis; (ii) agency costs and financial leverage exert a negative effect on firm growth; (iii) R&D investment and financial performance generate a positive effect on firm growth; (iv) the Great Recession (2007-2009) produced a negative effect on firm growth; (v) a nonlinear, inverted U-shaped relationship exists between firm size and firm growth; and (vi) Gibrat’s law does not hold. Our findings remain robust to transformations using first differences and forward orthogonal deviations as well as principal components reductions. These results are new to the literature, since the dynamics of firm growth has not been documented at the ICT industry level. Noteworthy policy implications emerge because the growth dynamics of the ICT industry move this sector toward more concentration and less competition. |
| Keywords: | ICT industry; Agency costs; Firm growth; Panel data; system-GMM |
| JEL: | G21 G28 G32 G34 |
| Date: | 2017–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uct:uconnp:2017-12&r=ict |
| By: | Andrés F. Barrientos; Alexander Bolton; Tom Balmat; Jerome P. Reiter; John M. de Figueiredo; Ashwin Machanavajjhala; Yan Chen; Charles Kneifel; Mark DeLong |
| Abstract: | Data stewards seeking to provide access to large-scale social science data face a difficult challenge. They have to share data in ways that protect privacy and confidentiality, are informative for many analyses and purposes, and are relatively straightforward to use by data analysts. We present a framework for addressing this challenge. The framework uses an integrated system that includes fully synthetic data intended for wide access, coupled with means for approved users to access the confidential data via secure remote access solutions, glued together by verification servers that allow users to assess the quality of their analyses with the synthetic data. We apply this framework to data on the careers of employees of the U. S. federal government, studying differentials in pay by race. The integrated system performs as intended, allowing users to explore the synthetic data for potential pay differentials and learn through verifications which findings in the synthetic data hold up in the confidential data and which do not. We find differentials across races; for example, the gap between black and white female federal employees' pay increased over the time period. We present models for generating synthetic careers and differentially private algorithms for verification of regression results. |
| JEL: | C51 C53 C55 C81 J15 J45 |
| Date: | 2017–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23534&r=ict |