The impact of customer-related IT investments: A study of customer satisfaction, shareholder returns, and diffusion

This dissertation studies the impact of customer-related IT investments on shareholder returns and customer satisfaction and examines the speed at which those technologies are diffused into the publicly held companies of the S&P 500 and the S&P MidCap 400. Customer-related IT investments are defined in this work as information technology investments made with the intention of improving or enhancing the customer experience. The motivation of this research is to understand if these investments increase customer satisfaction, as is their purpose, and to see if the shareholders of the companies who make technology investments perceive IT investing to be a profitable enterprise. The importance of this work is several-fold. It increases the understanding of technology's value to businesses, shareholders, and consumers. In addition, it furthers the understanding of the impacts of customer-related IT investments on business profitability through shareholder returns, and concurrently explores financial tools not usually used in IS research. This work also applies an innovative technique to demand estimation in Chapter 5 by using public firm announcements of investment into customer-related technologies as a surrogate for demand data. This technique allows demand estimation using a larger data set than would ordinarily be available.