(The) impact of IT adoption on user behavior and organizational performance

Abstract

Information Technology (IT) has changed the way we live, search information, purchase products, and manage health. We examine the impact of IT adoption on user behavior in e-commerce and organizational performance in the healthcare context. For the first essay, using a large transaction dataset from a leading e-marketplace in Korea, we empirically investigates (1) how the sales distribution in the mobile commerce channel is different from the sales distribution in the traditional PC channel, and (2) how mobile commerce channel adoption (as a search and purchase channel) affects e-market users' search intensity and their aggregated sales distribution. Despite the proliferation of studies on sales distributions in e-commerce, little is known about how such a distribution in online markets is affected by the presence of mobile channels, which have become a significant conduit for e-commerce. Our analysis in comparing the sales distributions between the PC and mobile channels reveals that transactions in the mobile channel are more concentrated on "head" products, compared to the PC channel sales. The subsequent user-level analysis in examining the causal effects of the first purchase in the mobile channel on e-market users' search intensity and aggregated sales distribution, reveals that e-market users search more, but are less (more) likely to choose tail (head) products, after making the first purchase in the mobile channel. This finding is contrary to our previous belief that more search activities lead to more "tail" product sales. The relationship between search intensity and head (tail) product sales, however, largely depends on the product categories. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings. For the second essay, using 1,965 U.S. hospital data in 232 health referral regions (HRRs), we examine how a hospital's and its neighboring hospitals' HIT adoptions interact with each other and how they impact readmission rates. U.S. government subsidies under the HITECH Act of 2009 have boosted hospitals' IT investments, which are expected to improve the quality of care as well as the effectiveness of healthcare management. Given the rush to adopt health information technology (HIT) throughout the continuum of care across healthcare providers, this study tries to identify the spillover effects of HIT adoption on quality of care. We find that a hospital's readmission rate is reduced by both its own and neighbors' HIT adoption. Such effects become greater along with the focal hospital's adoption. We further investigate how spillover effects vary with HRRs' different market structures and hospitals' meaningful-use status. Our findings offer theoretical and managerial insights for both healthcare researchers and practitioners.