During the past thirty years, the economy of the USA, along with other industrialized countries, has experienced several noticeable trends, namely, the economic slowdown, the tremendous increase in the amount of information technology investment, and fast structural change in terms of employment. With slow economic growth and fast IT capital accumulation, the so-called “information technology (...

An analysis of Brazilian federal expenditures in science and technology is presented is this study. The 1990-1999 data were compiled from records provided by two federal agencies (MCT and CNPq) responsible for managing most of the national budget related to these activities. The results indicate that the federal investments in Brazilian science and technology stagnated during the last decade (U...

We study a model of technology adoption. The firm’s profit is depending on the technology that it uses. The firm holds the option to upgrade its current technology with a new one. Technology progress is modeled with a Poisson process. The firm can either rely on the external R&D market or it can setup its own R&D center. The arrival rate of new technologies in the external R&D market is constan...

We study how the migration from an old to a new technology is affected by the access price to the old technology. We show that both the incumbent and the regulator are willing to set a very high access price to accelerate consumers’ migration to the new technology. When the quality of the old technology is exogenous and the entrant dominates investment in the new technology, the old technology ...

Using the country-level information technology (IT) expenditures and productivity data for the period from 1992 to 2000, we estimate production function augmented with IT capital stock in the first-difference form. As discussed in prior studies, we confirm that IT expenditures have significant positive effects on national productivity growth. The effects of IT expenditure on productivity growth...

Many business decisions involve issues that are not amenable to quantitative measures and analysis. One such domain of decisions is large-scale investments in information technology. Traditional capital budgeting methods have not proven eeective. In this paper, we present an alternative paradigm for qualitative decision analysis, embodied in the artiicial intelligence program: VOTE. We describe...

Information technology (IT) is essential to many businesses, but there are few guidelines for determining the adequate level of investment in IT. The purpose of this paper is to further understanding of the mechanism of I T investment. Previous studies on IT investment are briefly presented. The authors performed six-mini case studies of large companies in five different industries; these studi...

Social learning models of investment provide an interesting explanation for sudden changes in investment behaviour. Caplin and Leahy (1994) develop a model of social learning in which agents learn about the true state of demand from the investment suspension decisions of other agents. The author tests the main predictions of Caplin and Leahy’s model using a unique database of investment project...

In spite of the technologies developed during the last decade, the level of food loss is still high and is reported in many countries. According to the United Nations, more than 30 per cent of the mortality rate world-wide is caused by alimentary diseases. The desire of most countries to make food safer for consumption requires better food preservation and production techniques. In this regard,...