Browsing by Subject "Information technology"
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Item Analysis of automated data collection technologies for field materials management(2004-08-16) Grau Torrent, David; Caldas, Carlos H.; Haas, Carl T. (Carl Thomas)Materials handling operations on construction job sites are error prone and significantly decrease construction productivity. The deployment of automated data collection and sensing technologies on construction job sites can highly improve field materials management, eliminate data entry errors, and accelerate data collection processes. Based on their technical characteristics, benefits and barriers are discussed for each presented technology. Then, a case study demonstrates and quantifies some of the benefits of the deployment of a positioning technology within locating processes of large industrial projects. In a complementary effort, this thesis investigates the integration of materials' data within model-based information systems. A common pool of project information containing materials' identification and location would stimulate communication and collaboration among project players as a starting point to improve field materials management.Item Essays on housing and labor markets(2009-05) Guler, Bulent, 1979-; Corbae, Dean; Guvenen, FatihIn the first chapter, I study the effects of innovations in information technology on the housing market. Specifically, I focus on the improved ability of lenders to assess the credit risk of home buyers, which has become possible with the emergence of automated underwriting systems in the United States in the mid-1990s. I develop a standard life-cycle model with incomplete markets and idiosyncratic income uncertainty. I explicitly model the housing tenure choice of the households: rent/purchase decision for renters and stay/sell/default decision for homeowners. Risk-free lenders offer mortgage contracts to prospective home buyers and the terms of these contracts depend on the observable characteristics of households. Households are born as either good credit risk types--having a high time discount factor--or bad types--having a low time discount factor. The type of the household is the only source of asymmetric information between households and lenders. I find that as lenders have better information about the type of households, the average down payment fraction decreases together with an increase in the average mortgage premium, the foreclosure rate, and the dispersions of mortgage interest rates and down payment fractions, which are consistent with the trends in the housing market in the last 15 years. From a welfare perspective, I find that better information, on average, makes households better off. In the second chapter, I focus on the labor market behavior of couples. Search theory routinely assumes that decisions about the acceptance/rejection of job offers (and, hence, about labor market movements between jobs or across employment states) are made by individuals acting in isolation. In reality, the vast majority of workers are somewhat tied to their partners--in couples and families--and decisions are made jointly. This chapter studies, from a theoretical viewpoint, the joint job-search and location problem of a household formed by a couple (e.g., husband and wife) who perfectly pool income. The objective of the exercise, very much in the spirit of standard search theory, is to characterize the reservation wage behavior of the couple and compare it to the single-agent search model in order to understand the ramifications of partnerships for individual labor market outcomes and wage dynamics. We focus on two main cases. First, when couples are risk averse and pool income, joint-search yields new opportunities--similar to on-the job search--relative to the single-agent search. Second, when couples face offers from multiple locations and a cost of living apart, joint-search features new frictions and can lead to significantly worse outcomes than single-agent search. Finally, in the third chapter, I focus on the relation between house prices and interest rates. Although interest rates and housing prices seem mostly to have a negative relation in the data, the relation does not seem to be stable. For example, the recent run up in the global housing prices is generally explained by globally low interest rates. On the other hand, there have been periods where housing prices and interest rates moved together. Motivated by these observations, I formulate a two period OLG model to find out the form of the relationship between interest rates and housing prices. It appears that the distribution of homeownership is also important for housing price dynamics. I show that housing prices in the equilibrium do not always have a negative relation with interest rates.Item Essays on information technology for healthcare and sustainable traffic management(2020-09-02) Liu, Yixuan, Ph. D.; Lai, Guoming; Whinston, Andrew B.; Morrice, Douglas; Stinchcombe, Maxwell BInformation technology has fundamentally changed the world in every aspect. In this collection of research papers, I study some effects of IT in two domains - healthcare and sustainability - that closely related to human wellbeing. Levering the power of IT to redistribute resources, healthcare platforms have emerged to connect patients and physicians timely and economically. I study the strategic decisions of each party (Chapter 1) and the service design problem (Chapter 2) on such a two-sided platform using both theoretical modeling and data analytical tools. In Chapter 3, I study on a sustainable traffic management mechanism to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. In Chapter 1, we consider on-demand healthcare platforms that allow patients to seek care online from distributed doctors. Healthcare costs have been steadily increasing, while patient experience continues to sour with costly (many times unnecessary) commute and waiting. To alleviate the costs, various on-demand healthcare platforms have emerged but have been little investigated in academic research. We develop a strategic queueing model where the platform decides the commission rate upon which potential doctors make their participation, service quality and pricing decisions and potential patients make their service acquisition decisions independently. We find that in equilibrium a higher commission rate always lowers doctor participation as well as service quality, but it may increase the service price if it significantly softens the competition. Moreover, as patient intensity increases, the service quality improves, accompanied largely with a higher price. We further investigate the effect of platform price control. We find that allowing the platform to control the service price in addition to the commission rate may result in more doctor participation, higher service quality and price, higher platform profit, and surprisingly even higher profit for the doctors. This generally occurs when the patient intensity is either low or high, the waiting cost is low, or the doctor heterogeneity is low. Our results are useful to understand the performance of on-demand healthcare platforms. In Chapter 2, we focus on the service design problems of on-demand healthcare platforms. Many platforms offer patient subsidy in the form of a short-duration Q&A service at a meager price to induce user adoptions. Using a rich panel data from an on-demand healthcare platform in China, we investigate the impact of such service on demand for online consultations and offline appointments. We find that the subsidized service increases online service purchases and offline appointments by 4.7% and 8.7% in the subsequent month, respectively. Also, users’ expenditure on the online service in the following month increases by 15% after consuming the subsidized service, which highlights the revenue potential of such a service. Besides, we demonstrate the heterogeneity of spillover effects among different types of medical concerns and providers of different ranks. Our results shed light on the importance of such information-based services, which help manage the patient’s needs. In Chapter 3, we study an innovative routing mechanism to decrease GHG emissions in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT). Climate changes and global warming have become a severe issue that concerns people and governments all over the world. The combustion of fossil fuels, such as gasoline and diesel to transport people and goods, is one of the largest sources of CO2 emissions that heat the atmosphere. In this paper, we propose a combined information design and tolling mechanism to route traffics to decrease emissions. We formulate and characterize the equilibrium of a stochastic congestion game through the technique of potential functions. To evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism, we define a new metric called Environmental Price of Anarchy that captures the inefficiency in congestions and emissions resulted from vehicles’ selfish behaviors. Our work highlights the advantages of the combined approach that improves both the utilities of vehicles and the welfare of societyItem Female IT professionals in Brazil(2011-05) Swim, Jamie Lynnora; Barker, Lecia J.; Bailey, DianeSão Paulo is considered to be the hub of technology in Brazil and many Brazilian women are finding jobs in the growing technology industry there. While questions about women‟s low involvement in technical careers in the United States are being researched by organizations such as the National Center for Women & Information Technology, the American Association of University Women, and the Anita Borg Institute, research on this topic in Brazil is considerably more limited. In January 2011, 10 interviews were conducted with women in São Paulo, Brazil working in information technology (IT) careers. In an effort to understand how they got to their current careers interviewees were asked for their personal stories, perceptions, views, and opinions on career choice, work/personal life balance, employment history, and education. The majority of the responses in these interviews revealed a similar situation and similar perceptions to those expressed in the United States. Participation by females in the male-dominated IT sector in Brazil has been decreasing over the past decades and reasons for low female participation in IT are complex. Interviews revealed that 1) women working in technical careers believe that IT jobs are considered appropriate for Brazilian women, but that technical programs and workplaces are mainly occupied by men, 2) Brazilian women feel constrained by the expectation for women to be primary caretakers of domestic responsibilities even when both partners work full time, and 3) women are considered to be better communicators in Brazil, but most upper-level leadership positions in IT are held by men. This study is meant to be an initial effort on which further research can expand.Item The impact of information technology on vertical relationships(2006) Wu, Dazhong; Whinston, Andrew B.; Ray, GautamThis dissertation has three parts that study the impact of information technology on competition and vertical relationships from different perspectives. The first part focuses on an electronic market where product information is important for consumers to identify their ideal product and the Internet greatly reduces consumers’ search cost. The model studies how reduced search cost influences social welfare and retailers’ incentive to provide product information. It is found that if technology reduces consumers’ search cost to evaluate products and compare prices, sellers who invest in providing valuable information may not be able to recover their investments. Therefore, by lowering sellers’ incentive to prov vide product information, reduced search cost may negatively impact social welfare as consumers have to search more to identify their ideal product. The study also shows that sellers need to develop the capability of, and reputation for, information provision in order to make profits, even though some consumers and sellers may free ride. The second part extends the first model. In the second model, the manufacturer decides whether to distribute products through the electronic or the physical channel, or through both the channels. In the model, different channels have different search costs for consumers, different abilities to offer product information, and different reach to consumers. The model suggests that the manufacturer uses both the channels when product information is very valuable and product information is largely about digital attributes, or when the product information is not valuable. The model also suggests that when the manufacturer chooses to sell through both the channels the manufacturer need not sell through the most well-known electronic retailer. This part also discusses the case where the manufacture is vertically integrated. That is, the manufacturer itself operates in one of the channels. The third part continues the second part and focuses on firms’ vertical integration (VI) strategy. It examines firms included in 1995-1997 InformationWeek 500 and COMPUSTAT database to study the impact of competitive environment on how IT affects the level of vertical integration. It is found that the competitive environment moderates the impact of IT on vertical integration - in more dynamic environments IT is associated with a decrease in VI, and in more stable environments IT is associated with an increase in VI.Item (In)visible hybridity(2020-05) Reyes Retana, Jeronimo; Awai, Nicole; McCarthy, Katy (Kathryn)This report explains my multifaceted research on two different forms of hybrid geographies that expose the essence of liberal politics. In the first part, I deconstruct the taxonomy of the Texas-Tamaulipas border town area to frame it as a crucial zone for the praxis of North American neoliberalism. In the second part, I investigate the now recur- rent emergence of virtual economic and political zones underlaid by planetary-scale com- putational systems, bringing to the front the takeover of political geometries by self-regu- lated private corporations. In this scenario, hybrid geographies represent a fertile ground for nurturing an art-making process by way of implementation of peripheral perspectives that allow for grasping the complexity of centralized modes of governance reliant on new technologies. Thus, these are systems usually built upon opaque architectures or encrypt- ed languages in which art is capable of metabolizing the ambivalence of the development narratives pervasive in late capitalism.Item Information integration in the capital projects industry : interaction effects and benefits of complementary practices(2010-08) Kang, Young Cheol; Thomas, Stephen Richard, 1949-; O'Brien, William J.; Novoselac, Atila; O'Connor, James T.; Bias, Randolph G.; Mulva, Stephen P.Information integration is considered a source of competitive advantage in the capital projects industry. While it has been broadly implemented, many organizations appear to have achieved only limited benefits from their efforts. This dissertation investigates the complementarity relationship between information technology (IT) use and project execution processes and practices. It asserts that rather than directly improving an organization’s competitive advantage, IT serves instead as a mode to improve existing processes and practices which in turn serve to improve the bottom line. Building from this foundation, the dissertation proceeds to expand its findings to document mechanisms by which various resources influence the complementarity relationship. Topics within this dissertation are investigated with both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Using capital projects data, evidence of complementarity is established quantitatively between general use of IT and best practices. The benefits of complementarity in terms of cost, schedule, and rework project performance measures are documented. Data analyses show that more use of IT is associated with more use of best practice; and, projects that intensively implement IT and best practice tend to show superior project performance. Furthermore, by investigating the use of a specific technology, this dissertation presents a thorough statistical analysis showing that IT use affects the use of practices, which together support improved project performance. Next, this dissertation lists organization resources that may affect complementarity. Using sixteen actual information integration cases, the major resources consistently affecting complementarity are identified. Illustrations of seven case studies present how the resources are managed. The case studies are also used when discussing the interaction of IT use and processes generating complementarity. The primary contribution of this research is to provide a quantitative evidence of IT’s indirect impact on construction project performance via practices. A broad discussion citing the range of resources affecting the complementarity and identifying the major ones in the capital projects industry is another contribution of this research.Item Information technology and firms' organizational scope and structure(2007) Xue, Ling, 1975-; Ray, Gautam; Whinston, Andrew B.The dissertation consists of three essays that explore the relationship between information technology and firms' organizational and governance structure. The first essay examines how information technology (IT) moderates the impact of firms' assets on the level of vertical integration and horizontal diversification. The empirical analysis suggests that IT is associated with a decrease in vertical integration in firms with more tangible assets. The analysis also indicates that IT is associated with a greater increase in horizontal diversification in firms with more intangible assets. The general implication of this essay is that firms with more tangible assets may use IT to become more vertically specialized, whereas firms with more intangible assets may deploy IT to become more horizontally diversified. The second essay uses a moral hazard model to examine the relationship between environmental uncertainty and decentralization in IT governance. It is shown that this relationship is determined by a trade-off between the need for processing local information and the moral hazard problem. The trade-off results in an inverted-U-shaped relationship between environmental uncertainty and decentralization in IT governance. The increase in environmental uncertainty first increases and then decreases the likelihood of adopting decentralized IT governance, and thus decentralized IT governance is not likely to be desirable when the external environment is either highly stable or highly turbulent. An empirical study using a sample of 455 business sites of Fortune 1000 companies validates the theoretical results. The third essay presents an analytical model to examine the design and management of partner relationships in IT service. The firm hires a manager to manage the partner relationship. However, the firm has to decide whether to delegate the design of the relational contract with the partner, to the manager. We find that when the firm and the manager have asymmetric information about the manager's inclination to maintain a long-term partner relationship for the firm, delegation in relational contracting can help the firm in screening the myopic manager from the farsighted manager.Item Interaction Effects of Information Technologies and Best Practices on Construction Project Performance(ASCE Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 2013) Kang, Youngcheol; O'Brien, William J.; Dai, Jiukun; Mulva, Stephen P.; Thomas, Stephen P.; Chapman, Robert E.; Butry, DavidBuilding from considerable empirical research in the general business literature, this paper quantitatively explores the view that the benefits of information technologies manifest themselves through improvement in work processes. In turn, better work processes lead to increased project performance. Using an overall sample of 133 projects (missing data make specific correlation sample sizes smaller) from the Construction Industry Institute Benchmarking and Metrics database, this paper analyzes correlations between technology use and integration, best practices, and project performance measured with cost, schedule, and rework metrics. Data are also used to assess the complementary interaction between technology use, work processes as measured by best practices, and performance. The findings show that there are limited significant beneficial correlations between information technology use and performance, slightly more significant beneficial correlations between best practice use and performance, and several significant correlations between information technology use and application of Best practices. Interaction effects of the combined use of information technologies and best practices against performance are assessed, finding several positive correlations, although limited data availability prevents robust statistical evaluation. Overall, the paper concludes there is evidence that the benefits of information technologies in construction are found through changes in work processes. This paper thus challenges more common approaches that attempt to directly correlate the impact of information technology use on project performance with corresponding implications for both academic and industrial attempts at assessment.Item Nuevos paradigmas de participación ciudadana a través de las tecnologías de información y comunicación(2001-03) Finquelievich, Susana; Baumann, Pablo; Jara, AlejandraItem Policy goals, political reality, and IT problems : the influence of politics and policy-making on the launch of Healthcare.gov(2014-12) Srinivasan, Ram, active 21st century; Granof, Michael H.Successfully designing and delivering a large-scale information technology (IT) system to meet new organizational objectives is a difficult undertaking in any context. The failure of the federally-facilitated online health insurance exchanges – known most commonly by their website address Healthcare.gov – to properly function when they opened for operations in 2013 provides a case study in how politics and policy-making can uniquely complicate IT projects in the public sector. Analysis reveals several instances where the legislative and regulatory process contributed to the project’s initial failure: from the project’s inception, elected representatives oversold the familiarity and simplicity of the site; statutory and regulatory law amplified the underlying technological complexity of the exchanges; partisan tensions extended the uncertainties around project scope until much too late in the process; legal and political concerns for maintaining stated delivery deadlines came at the cost of adequate testing and site functionality when it first opened; and the team appointed to oversee the project was more sensitive to political challenges then technological ones. Based on these findings, several recommendations are provided to help future representatives and government administrators minimize the negative toll that politics and policy-making can exact on a public sector IT project’s success. These include actively managing expectations, increasing information flow, simplifying functionality, providing fluid but reasonable delivery timelines, and appointing independent and technically savvy project leadership. Using Healthcare.gov as a case study on the effects politics and policy can have on developing IT systems can better prepare legislators and the public for future challenges of developing and implementing technology solutions in the public sector.Item Site-level integration of information technologies in construction : an empirical study of information technology adoption(2013-12) Howe, Justin Michael; O'Brien, William J.The availability of information technologies (IT) that can be harnessed to support construction projects at the site-level (e.g. tablets devices) continues to increase substantially. Most computer devices and IT resources today are designed for mobility, providing construction onsite personnel potential access to electronic resources and relevant information while on the construction site or in the construction field office; enabling the possibility of real-time data exchanges amongst various project entities, unrestricted by location. Recent industry literature has highlighted the benefits associated with the use of onsite emerging construction IT and, as a result, construction organizations are showing a strong interest in implementing these technologies to improve and develop more cost effective construction document management and communication processes. Despite the perceived benefits, the construction industry has been slow to adopt IT, particularly in the construction execution phase and, more specifically, at the site-level. This research aims to analyze the industry's current state of construction field and office personnel's use and proficiency related to IT. This study also offers insight into the impacts the adoption of IT has on field personnel's onsite processes, and identifies industry-specific barriers associated with the adoption of IT. To extend the knowledge related to IT usage of project site-level personnel, the results of a survey, follow-up interview, and an IT training and evaluation study were reviewed. These tools helped to investigate and acquire data regarding site managers' and field engineers' technology-related competence, their applications of IT to produce work artefacts, and circumstances in which users and technology hinder the adoption of IT in construction. Collectively, an analysis of the results revealed that the construction industry's current state of IT adoption at the site level is more advanced than previously perceived; particularly with the use of basic technology and software tools. Furthermore, the results offer a foundation for determining "areas of improvement" for increased adoption of IT in an onsite environment. Industry business-related limitations and individual's technology proficiency currently present the prevalent barriers related to the hindrance of adoption. The inadequate effectiveness of IT to support field personnel's daily processes was also found to a be a contributory constraint.Item La sociedad civil en la economía del conocimiento: TICs y desarrollo socio-económico(2004-11) Finquelievich, SusanaItem La sociedad civil en la era digital: Organizaciones comunitarias y redes sociales sustentadas por TIC en Argentina.(2005-04) Finquelievich, Susana; Kisilevsky, GracielaItem The success of Plan Ceibal(2016-05) Moscatelli, Esmeralda; Bailey, Diane E., 1961-; Rodriguez-Lluesma, CarlosThis descriptive study investigates Plan Ceibal, an OLPC project based in Uruguay, and posits that Plan Ceibal has been very successful. The project distributes and manages laptops for pre-schools, primary schools, secondary schools, and technical careers programs, currently serving over 700,000 students and teachers nationally. Plan Ceibal has also launched a number of online tools such as an adaptive math platform, an online digital library, a social inclusion computer program, and English classes for primary students. Uruguay has become a vanguard for the OLPC project and is recognized globally as the only country to provide a take-home laptop for every child and teacher, at every grade level.Item TIC, desarrollo y reducción de la pobreza: Políticas y propuestas(2004-07) Finquelievich, Susana; Lago Martínez, Silvia; Jara, Alejandra; Vercelli, ArielItem Understanding the creation and adoption of information technology innovations: the case of open source software development and the diffusion of mobile commerce(2004) Long, Ju; Whinston, Andrew B.; Tomak, KeremThis dissertation studies several aspects of creation and adoption of information technology (IT) innovation. In particular, my research focuses on two brand-new phenomena in IT innovation: Open Source software development model and mobile commerce. Open source is a radically new model to develop software. My dissertation explores the sustainability of open source software development model. In my research, I collect detailed empirical data of successful and less successful open source projects. I identify several important factors that may determine the success or failure of an open source project. These factors include the vital roles of core developers and the importance of publicizing a project, which have not been given adequate attention in existing literature. My work could provide a better understanding of the survival and viability of open source software development model. I also explore a more and more important business model in open source software development: enterprise open source. Unlike conventional open source development model, which depends on voluntary contributions from the developers in the community, enterprise open source is invested, developed and managed by for-profit firms. I use mathematical modeling combined with empirical case studies as the research method to study various profit models of enterprise open source. The conclusions I get are supported by the empirical data. One main implication of the research is: enterprise open source will become the main propelling force in developing open source software. It can also pose serious challenges to proprietary software development model. Having studied open source as a new way to generate IT innovation, I study how these innovations could be applied in various industries. I focus on how innovations in wireless technology can be applied in healthcare, marketing and financial services industries. I discussed in detail the available technologies and how these technologies can revolutionize the practices in the above industries. My work could be of particularly great value to business practitioners in the mobile commerce field.