Daniel Snow

Cleaning House: The Impact of Information Technology Monitoring on Employee Theft and Productivity

This paper examines how firm investments in technology-based employee monitoring impact both misconduct and productivity. We use unique and detailed theft and sales data from 392 restaurant locations from five firms that adopt a theft monitoring information technology IT product. We use difference-in-differences models with staggered adoption dates to estimate the treatment effect of IT monitoring on theft and productivity. We find significant treatment effects in reduced theft and improved productivity that appear to be primarily driven by changed worker behavior rather than worker turnover. We examine four mechanisms that may drive this productivity result: economic and cognitive multitasking, fairness-based motivation, and perceived increases of general oversight. The observed productivity results represent substantial financial benefits to both firms and the legitimate tip-based earnings of workers. Our results suggest that employee misconduct is not solely a function of individual differences in ethics or morality, but can also be influenced by managerial policies that can benefit both firms and employees. This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.

EXTRAORDINARY EFFICIENCY GROWTH IN RESPONSE TO NEW TECHNOLOGY ENTRIES: THE CARBURETOR'S "LAST GASP".

Technologies often experience a period of extraordinary improvement or a “last gasp�? before being superseded. Although last gasps are important both to technological transitions and firm strategies, their origin has been little studied. The most common explanation is that the materialization of a threat from a new technology causes adherents of the threatened technology to work harder to improve its performance. Anecdotal evidence has been cited in support of this “trying harder�? explanation, but it has not yet been subjected to a test against alternative explanations. In this article, I develop two new explanations for last gasps. The first, a selection effect, is that new technologies force old technologies out of inefficient applications, making them appear to be more efficient. The second, a spillover effect, is that technologies introduced contemporaneously with a superseding technology may provide spillover improvements to incumbent technologies. I use data from the EPA and from carburetor repair manuals to test these and the existing “trying harder�? explanation, I find that the carburetor’s last gasp was caused by both selection and spillover effects. However, only those firms that also produced the new technology were able to capture the benefits of these spillovers.

Intergenerational Hybrids: Spillbacks, Spillforwards, and Adapting to Technology Discontinuities

During technological discontinuities, incumbents frequently develop hybrids of competing technical generations. Although some prior work implies that such intergenerational hybrids may be the result of organizational dysfunction, we propose that in some cases hybrids may be sophisticated learning tools that shape organizational adaptation to a technological discontinuity. In this paper, we suggest two mechanisms through which intergenerational hybrids may affect organizational adaptation: spillbacks and spillforwards. In an empirical test among the population of automobile carburetor manufacturers during a technological discontinuity, we observe that organizations developing intergenerational hybrids capture spillback benefits-knowledge spillovers from an emerging technology generation to the current generation. Furthermore, we find that these same organizations also capture spillforwards-spillover benefits from developing higher-performing intergenerational hybrids that improve their product performance in the future technology generation. These results suggest that intergenerational hybrids may be stepping-stones for organizations to learn about and adapt to technology discontinuities.

Supplier Innovation Strategy: Transactional Hazards and Innovation in the Automotive Supply Chain

Over the last few decades, innovation has doubled automobile performance at a time when outsourcing has increased. But outsourcing is subject to well-known contracting hazards that would also afflict outsourcing for innovation. In this paper, we examine how supplier firms generate innovation in the presence of such hazards, using a recent survey of the US automotive supply chain that contains new measures of innovative activity. Taking the supplier perspective on the traditionally buyer-framed make-or-buy problem pays surprising dividends. First, we identify three supplier innovation strategies — distinct combinations of various innovative activities. Next, we find evidence that each strategy represents a response to the transactional hazards associated with innovating in this environment. Finally, the coexistence of heterogeneous supplier strategies enhances our understanding of the buyer’s make-or-buy problem, providing a more complex picture of the various approaches to transactional hazards that buyers employ simultaneously.