Migration to open standard electronic integration: An economic and cross-generational analysis

This dissertation focuses on firm's migration to open-standard electronic integration and seeks to study what factors may affect the migration. It consists of three inter-related chapters focused on studying firm's adoption of e-business as a general innovation, adoption of the open standards and Internet technologies for electronic integration, and adoption of electronic procurement which is a particular activity based on electronic integration.; In Chapter 1, using empirical data of 4,747 firms, we show that the adoption decisions of e-business are better understood by the combination of innovation attributes and adoption contexts. We further tease out several finer-grained results about a firm's absorptive capacity: greater absorptive capacity makes firms better positioned to "absorb" technology advances, to be more "tolerant" to incompatibility, and to mitigate the negative influence of adoption costs and security concerns. These results suggest that careful attention be paid to absorptive capacity and the "innovation-context fit."; In Chapter 2, drawing upon economic theories of network effects, herd behavior, and path dependency, we develop a model of open-standard electronic integration adoption that features trading partners adoption and expected benefits (increasing payoff), peers influence (herd behavior), and prior network experience (path dependency) as prominent antecedents. We test this model and associated hypotheses using structural equation modeling on a large dataset of 544 firms. Our empirical analyses provide significant support for the network effects theory, and show that firm's prior experience with relevant network technologies may strengthen the effect of increasing payoff but mitigate herd behavior.; In Chapter 3, we examine firm's migration across different generations of electronic procurement. Extending Chapter 2, we theorize how patterns of open-standard electronic procurement (OSEI) adoption may differ between EDI users and non-users. We collect a unique dataset with a cross-generational focus, including 150 firms with EDI experience and 127 firms without EDI experience. Data analysis shows that EDI users are more sensitive to the costs of adopting OSEI, and interestingly, adoptions of EDI and OSEI are positively related to each other if adopted for different types of goods. These findings suggest the subtle role of path dependency, highlighting a tension between path-dependent learning and switching costs.