Tag Archives: Internet

Erik Brynjolfsson on Big Data: A revolution in decision-making improves productivity

MIT Sloan Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson

There is a fundamental change underway in the way that companies make decisions. Instead of relying on a leader’s gut instincts, an increasing number of companies are embracing a new method that involves data-based analytics. This ‘Big Data’ revolution is occurring mainly because technology enables firms to gather extremely detailed information from and propagate knowledge to their consumers, suppliers, alliance partners, and competitors.

Companies that use this type of ‘data driven decision making’ actually show higher performance. Working with Lorin Hitt and Heekyung Kim, I analyzed 179 large publicly-traded firms and found that the ones that adopted this method are about 5% more productive and profitable than their competitors.  Furthermore, the study found a relationship between this method and other performance measures such as asset utilization, return on equity and market value. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit for companies that are able to use Big Data to their advantage. Read More »

Facebook IPO and beyond: Catherine Tucker sees rich new revenue source in social advertising

MIT Sloan Assoc. Prof. Catherine Tucker

Much of the attention on Facebook’s initial public offering this week has been on whether the social networking giant is valued too highly. But whatever its current worth, Facebook has a potentially huge new source of revenue coming its way from “social advertising.” According to a new research paper I’ve just published, Facebook itself is only just beginning to realize the untapped potential of social advertising, in which marketers use online social relationships to improve ad targeting using data on Facebook users’ friend networks.

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Erik Brynjolfsson: New e-book outlines promise and peril of digital revolution

MIT Sloan Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson

From Economics of Information Blog

Andy McAfee and I have just released a short e-book, Race Against the Machine. In it, we try to reconcile two important facts. 1) Technology continues to progress rapidly. In fact, the past decade has seen the fastest productivity growth since the 1960s, but 2) median wages and employment have both stagnated, leaving millions of people worse off than before. This presents a paradox: if technology and productivity are improving so much why are millions being left behind?

In the book, we document remarkable advances in digital technologies in particular. Innovations like IBM’s Watson, Google’s self-driving car, Apple’s Siri are turning science fiction into reality. Machines are doing more and more tasks that once only humans could do.

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The big question for online advertisers: To personalize or not to personalize?

MIT Sloan Asst. Prof. Catherine Tucker

We use the Internet to research things all the time. Whether it’s a big purchase like a vacation or something smaller like a pair of running shoes, we often begin with a search for the topic online, eventually drilling down to find specific product reviews and details. But what happens when the pattern of websites we visit triggers personalized online ads that follow us around the Internet? If you’re later reading an unrelated article on a news site, will you really pay more attention to an ad for the specific hotel or pair of shoes you were looking at earlier?

The answer is: probably not. It turns out that when people are at the early stages of researching on the Internet — and haven’t likely developed strong product preferences — they respond better to generalized messages intended for a mass audience. Ads that are too specific aren’t going to convert

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Big data drives security, risk discussion at MIT CIO affair

From Enterprise CIO Forum

I’ve  sat through the first two two sessions at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, expecting to hear all about the wonderful opportunities doing digital business.

Was I wrong!  The sessions, entitled 1) “Opportunities in the Digital Business World” and 2) “What every CIO should Know about the Future impact of Digital Business,”  focused on security, risk, privacy and how to manage infinite oceans of data were the dominant topic. We heard words like “headaches” and “hacker.”

Certainly, no one has corned the market for a playbook that explains how CIOs deal with vast amounts of data, all that threatens it and how to exploit it.

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