Ajit Kambil

Does information technology lead to smaller firms

Many changes in the organization of work in the United States since 1975 have been attributed to the increased capabilities and use of information technology IT in business. However, few studies have attempted to empirically examine these relationships. The primary goal of this paper is to assess the hypothesis that investments in information technology are at least partially responsible for the important organizational change, the shift of economic activity to smaller firms. We examine this hypothesis using industry-level data on IT capital and four measures of firm size, including employees and sales per firm. We find broad evidence that investment in IT is significantly associated with subsequent decreases in the average size of firms. We also find that these decreases in firm size are most pronounced two to three years after the IT investment is made.

Reengineering the Dutch Flower Auctions: a Framework for Analyzing Exchange Organizations

This paper specifies a generalizable model of exchange processes and develops a processs takeholder analysis framework to evaluate alternative market designs. This framework is applied to analyze a number of information technology initiatives in the Dutch flower markets. The Dutch flower auctions are the worlds leading centers for trading cut flowers and potted plants. We undertake a cross-case analysis and apply our framework to analyse successes and failures in the introduction of new IT-based trading mechanisms in these markets. Based on our study, we develop a number of testable propositions on: the separation of physical and informational processes in trading, the responses of stakeholders to changes in available information due to IT initiatives, and economic and incentive conditions required for adoption of new trading processes. Finally, our detailed cases illustrate the institutional and incentive constraints, and complexities encountered in the introduction of new electronic markets.

Doing business in the wired world

Using the Internet for business use, ie., electronic commerce, promises to dramatically alter the structure and processes of commerce. Managers will have to invent new business models that reemphasize scale, differentiation, and brands to effectively compete on a noisy infrastructure with low transaction costs. They will also have to spend substantial time redesigning transaction processes and participating in industry groups to develop new e-commerce conventions. Effectively implementing these strategies and simultaneously reconciling new and existing business models will be key to a firms success.

Reflections and Projections on Creativity in Operations Research and Management Science: a Pressing Need for a Shift in Paradigm

This paper is an outgrowth of a talk given at a plenary session of the national meeting of ORSA/TIMS (now INFORMS) in May of 1996. Rather than speculate on what might be the possible domain of OR/MS within a systems framework, the paper gives a sketch of what basic ideas there are today that can help us get to a unified mathematical theory of the subject. The concept of influence occurs in all fields of knowledge-from physics, with its gravitational and electromagnetic influences, to sociology with its societal, political, economic, and technological influences. We argue that influence, a sensed, perceived or inferred stimulus, is the single most central concept for analyzing causal relations in OR/MS problems. Problem solving is contextual and focuses on the distribution of influence in allocation, queuing, inventory, and similar problems by manipulating measurable quantities. Because most influences are abstract and intangible, emphasis on creating structures to represent and measure the flow of influence of intangibles and their propagation is critical for the development of a general scientific theory for OR/MS, more critical than in any other field because our problem domain is very general and interdisciplinary. The paper advocates the need for a systemic integration of the diverse approaches used in OR/MS within a single framework for all areas, including dependencies and feedback among influences to maintain the full integrity of the problems we solve. Examples and illustrations are given together with observations about the use of creativity and intelligence to move the process of creating a theory beyond the traditional process of problem solving.

Public access Web information systems: lessons from the Internet EDGAR project

The Internet and the Web Information Systems (WIS) create new channels for communicationsbetween governments, corporations and individuals. Governments collect, generate anddisseminate vast amounts of information. In a market driven and democratic society, thisinformation is vital to enhance the trust of citizens in their government and institutions, andcritical to individual and organizational decision-making. This paper describes lessons learnedfrom the EDGAR on the Internet (EOI) project, an early demonstration web informationsystem (WIS) for disseminating corporate disclosure documents filed with the U.S. Securitiesand Exchange Commission (SEC). Building on our experience with this system, and theemerging impact of the Internet on the market for disclosure documents, we provide guidelinesfor governments and information vendors to effectively adopt and adapt to web-enabledinnovations for data dissemination.

Partial coordination. I. The best of pre-coordination and post-coordination

The introduction of computerized post-coordination has solved many of the problems of pre-coordinated subject access. However, the adoption of computerized post-coordination results in the loss of some pre-coordination benefits. Specifically, the effect of hiding terms within the context of others is lost in post-coordination which gives lead status to every document term. This results in spurious matches of terms out of context. Library patrons and Internet searchers are increasingly dissatisfied with subject access performance, in part because of unmanageably large retrieval sets. The need to enhance precision and limit the size of retrieval sets motivates this work which proposes partial coordination, an approach which incorporates the advantages of computer search with the ability of pre-coordination to limit spurious partial matches and thereby enhance precision.

Introduction to 'Innovative Auction Markets' Special Issue

This special issue of EM — Electronic Markets on ‘Innovative Auction Markets’ illustrates the increasingly pervasive and diverse applications of online auctions. From auctions for keywords tied to search engines, to B2B and financial auctions, or the use of auctions to generate predictive information for decision making — online auctions are becoming more widely applied in practice. Since the last special issue on auctions was guest edited in this journal by Stefan Klein in 1997, research on online auction designs and implementation has also become much more popular in information systems, marketing and economics. Online auctions have a number of advantages for the social assignation of value, trading and resource allocation. Online auctions enable:

Partial coordination. II. A preliminary evaluation and failure analysis

Partial coordination is a new method for cataloging documents forsubject access. It is especially designed to enhance the precision of documentsearches in online environments. This paper reports a preliminaryevaluation of partial coordination which shows promising results comparedwith full text retrieval. We also report the difficulties in empiricallyevaluating the effectiveness of automatic full-text retrieval in contrast tomixed methods such as partial coordination which combine humancataloging with computerized retrieval. Based on our study we proposeresearch in this area will substantially benefit from a common framework forfailure analysis and a common data set. This will allow information retrievalresearchers adapting library style cataloging to large electronic documentcollections, as well as those developing automated or mixed methods, todirectly compare their proposals for indexing and retrieval. This paperconcludes by suggesting guidelines for constructing such a testbed.