Joint ITM/INO seminar with Professor Chris Forman

Dear all

On the 23rd of April,  Prof. Chris Forman will give a seminar. It will be a joint ITM/INO seminar.

 
Title: The Digital Reorganization of Firm Boundaries: IT Use and Vertical Integration in U.S. Manufacturing.

Abstract
We investigate complementarities between external uses of information technology (IT) and firm boundary decisions following the diffusion of the commercial Internet. Using detailed plant-level data covering roughly 2,500 establishments from the U.S. Census of Manufactures, we focus on the decision to allocate production output to either downstream plants within the same firm or to external customers. Using a differences-in-differences design, we find that IT-enabled coordination with external supply chain partners is associated with a significant decline in downstream vertical integration. Our results are robust to extensive time-varying controls for both internal and external downstream demand, as well as instrumental variables estimation. In addition, we find that the upstream and downstream uses of digital coordination are complementary to each other; the magnitude of the effect is greatest when both suppliers and customers are granted greater visibility into the focal plant’s operations.

Bio

Chris Forman is the Brady Family Term Professor at the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2002, and was previously on the faculty of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University until 2007.

 His research focuses on innovation in enterprise IT, including both the business process innovation that accompanies enterprise IT investment within firms as well as the strategies of enterprise IT suppliers. This research has included the study of how geography shapes the benefits of IT investment within firms, the platform strategies of independent software vendors, and the implications of IT investment for firm organization and firm boundaries, among other topics.

 He has published over 30 articles and book chapters.  He has served as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He currently serves as Associate Editor at Management Science and has previously served as an Associate Editor at Information Systems Research and Information Economics and Policy.

Some of Chris recent publications
 
•    Chris Forman and Nicolas van Zeebroeck (2012) "From wires to partners: How the Internet has fostered R&D collaborations within firms" Management Science 58(8): 1549-1568.  
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•    Marco Ceccagnoli, Chris Forman, Peng Huang, and D.J. Wu (2012) "Co-creation of Value in a Platform Ecosystem: The Case of Enterprise Software" MIS Quarterly 36(1): 263-290.  
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•    Forman, Chris and Anne Gron, (2011) “Vertical Integration and Information Technology Investment in the Insurance Industry." Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 27(1): 180-218.  
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•    Forman, Chris, Avi Goldfarb, and Shane Greenstein (2012) "The Internet and Local Wages: A Puzzle" American Economic Review 102(1): 556-575.  
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•    Arora, Ashish and Chris Forman (2007) "How Local are IT Services: Proximity and IT Outsourcing," Journal of Management Information Systems 24(2): 73-102.  
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•    Langer, Nishtha, Chris Forman, Sunder Kekre, and Baohong Sun, “Ushering Buyers into Electronic Channels: An Empirical Analysis,” Forthcoming, Information Systems Research.  
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