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We investigate firm decisions to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) technology and how adoption is sourced: by purchasing commercial readymade software, by developing or customizing solutions in-house, or both. Using a cross-sectional data set of 3143 firms from across Europe, we examine the extent to which sourcing strategies exhibit complementarity or substitution. We find that adoption of AI using readymade software as a sourcing strategy is now increasingly commonplace, but differs across industrial sectors. Further, complementarities between sourcing strategies are common across sectors, though with some differences in strength and some exceptions. Our results show that sourcing strategies play an important role in shaping AI adoption decisions among firms., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This paper investigates the relationship between ICT and international R&D collaborations among 19 OECD countries from 2000 to 2015. More specifically, it looks at the impact of broadband penetration on the number of international co-inventions measured through patents. Poisson and Negative binomial regression models are employed for estimation. The results reveal a non-linear association between broadband access and international R&D collaborations, characterized by an inverted U-shaped curve. Additionally, the insights show that broadband penetration increased the concentration of existing and new collaboration ties. Subsequent analysis is undertaken, splitting the overall country-pairs sample into seven technology areas using the OST7 classification. Consistent with the overall findings, Electronics, Instruments, Chemicals, and Pharma exhibit the same inverted U-shaped relationship. However, the relationship is non-significant for Industrial and Mechanical Processes, while Civil engineering displays a positive linear association. These results also underline how crucial it is to consider particular technology areas when assessing how technology adoption affects international R&D collaboration., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Digitalization has changed the way certain firms create and capture value. One channel for this change is through the emergence of business ecosystems. Taking part in these ecosystems requires a certain set of dynamic capabilities, called integrative capabilities. In this article, we use data from a large-scale, cross-industries and cross-continents survey to empirically test whether the presence of such capabilities are associated with faster revenue growth. We conclude that it is the case, providing empirical confirmation to the theory that participation in a business ecosystem helps with the value creation or capture of a firm., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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This paper studies the diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) within firms, from exploration to local adoption to full-scale exploitation. The optimal timing of technology adoption represents a balance between preempting the risk of competition and time needed to acquire necessary complements, to ensure a successful return on investment. We formulate and test the idea that this balance changes along the adoption curve from experimentation to exploitation. We first model the decision of a firm facing Cournot competition to explore then exploit AI and assess the role of a variety of internal complements (technological and organizational) as well as competitive rivalry in these processes. Based on this theoretical model, a reduced form model of internal diffusion of AI is then estimated. Three results emerge: (1) rivalry triggers a competitive technology race that prevails in the exploitation more than in the exploration phase; (2) direct AI complements (such as machine learning) favor both adoption and exploitation, while indirect complements (such as cloud and big data) matter more for the experimentation than for the exploitation phase; (3) organizational complements are important for exploiting AI at scale, while technological ones drive exploration and adoption more than exploitation., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Strategic renewal has gained large momentum as an important process made by incumbents when transitioning towards digitization. This research systematically tests and confirms the importance of strategic renewal as a key leverage point to reap financial benefits out of using digital technologies .We also explain the paradox of limited strategic renewal in incumbents as a result of major organizational barriers., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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This thesis contains three papers focusing on firms' behaviors in complex interactions. The first paper focuses on the pricing of complements, for example, patents in a patent pool. In such a situation, firms might face multi-marginalization problems of such magnitude that the equilibrium prices lead to an aggregate price higher than the monopoly price. In such a situation, by coordinating their prices, firms would lower the aggregate price for technology. However, firms might also coordinate to increase their prices in some situations. Whether firms’ price coordination in the presence of complements increases or lowers prices depends on demand characteristics and the pattern of technology complementarity, which are difficult to assess by competition agencies. In a seminal paper, Lerner and Tirole (2004) propose independent licensing as an information-free device to ensure that only efficient patent pools form. The first paper of this thesis shows that independent licensing is insufficient to restore patent pool efficiency. A cap on the level of independent licenses should complement such independent licensing. The second paper assesses another situation in which firms could cooperate in ways that could benefit or harm consumers. In this paper, firms could repeatedly coordinate on a dimension close to providing a public good, such as energy-efficient technology, which benefits society. However, they could also collude on prices, which harms consumers. The second paper assesses whether a second, pro-competitive, dimension of coordination increases the likelihood of price collision. The third paper analyzes the consequences of input standardization on vertical integration and entry of firms. Standards facilitate compatibility between input providers and are a substitute for adapting the inputs to the needs of the final good producer. Without a standard, inputs are less compatible, and adaptation becomes more important for generating profits. When profits are high, thi, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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While the adoption and use of artificial intelligence (AI) are now significant, overall adoption rates remain low (Kazakova et al 2020; McElheran et al 2023; Zolas et al 2020). One recent line of work has argued that AI represents a type of general-purpose technology (GPT) (Bresnahan and Trajtenberg 1995; Trajtenberg 2019; Furman and Seamans 2019), and so requires significant downstream innovation to adapt general solutions to unique user needs (Brynjolfsson, Rock, and Syverson 2019, 2021; Goldfarb, Taska, and Teodoridis 2023). At the firm level, this will require a combination of business process innovation but also the development of software that will fit the unique needs of firms. This need for complementary adaptation and innovation has historically proven to be difficult (Bresnahan and Greenstein 1996)., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Today’s world is profoundly transformed by two major revolutions. The first one is related to the sustainability transition, while the other relates to the digital transformation of our economies and societies. Recently, regions such as Europe have put the integration between these two transformations high on their agenda. A term was coined for it: the twin transition. In a nutshell, the twin transition aims at leveraging the potential of technologies such as Cloud technologies, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to tackle the sustainability transition., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This dissertation consists of four self-contained chapters, each based on an independent research paper. The first two address the role of expert judgments on consumer behavior and welfare by focusing on the Goncourt Prize and the Booker Prize. The third and fourth chapters study the role of demonstrations and the determinants of corruption. All four chapters are empirical and rely on observational data. The challenge in applied work when randomized control experiments cannot be used is to draw causal inferences, which is the core message of the “identification revolution” in economics. The common feature of the chapters of this dissertation is that each one addresses causality by using a specific identification strategy taking advantage of a natural experiment. Specifically, Chapter 1 rests on a regression discontinuity design allowed by the decision process of the Goncourt to assess the effect of the prize on sales. Chapter 2 relies on a difference-in-differences strategy to investigate the impact of the Booker on consumer welfare. Chapter 3 estimates the efffect of demonstrations on voting outcomes in the 2002 French presidential election by using weather conditions as an instrumental variable. Finally, Chapter 4 implements a regression discontinuity design to study the effect of electoral rules on political corruption by leveraging the fact that the French law for municipal elections conditions the electoral rules on the population size of a municipality. I provide below a succinct overview of the method and findings of each chapter., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In its recent form, Artificial intelligence (AI) is an ensemble of technologies, which can be defined as machine-based systems for effective enterprise automation and influential decisions”. If businesses that use AI can potentially reap a competitive advantage, the optimal exploitation of such a complex ensemble of technologies remains uncertain as well as requires to have competitive access to complements such as data or new skills. Existing models of organizational use of technologies often ignore either the dynamics of competitive interactions (which can lead to pre-emption or epidemic diffusion) or the role of uncertainty, or both. In the case of AI, one type of uncertainty is particularly important: uncertainty about the technology's use cases (i.e. what to do with it). This paper proposes to apply a real options perspective to the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) adoption framework in order to uncover important patterns in the use of AI among firms. The results are threefold: (1) we find evidence of significant epidemic effects in AI use, (2) uncertainty moderates epidemic effects, and (3) the impact of uncertainty depends on its source: an uncertain AI use case reduces herd behaviours while uncertainty about use case returns still favours them. These results highlight the importance of exploration and collective learning in the diffusion of emerging and complex technologies, especially when companies struggle to identify the most profitable use cases for the technology., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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Cet ouvrage offre une analyse pluridisciplinaire de la dynamique d’intégration économique européenne. Il est destiné à tous ceux qui veulent saisir les enjeux de l’économie de l’Union européenne (UE) et qui disposent de notions élémentaires d’économie, qu’ils soient étudiants de différentes disciplines ou praticiens issus des institutions publiques, des ONG ou du monde de l’entreprise. Contrairement à certains ouvrages, celui-ci ne se contente pas ici de reprendre les politiques européennes telles que décrites par les institutions elles-mêmes, mais les resitue dans le contexte économique général de l’UE et du reste du monde. Cela permet de mieux en mesurer l’impact et l’efficacité par rapport aux objectifs affichés. La méthodologie adoptée dans cet ouvrage est résolument historique et empirique. Les concepts économiques utilisés sont le plus souvent illustrés par des exemples concrets pour en faciliter la compréhension. Cet ouvrage analyse les principales politiques économiques de l’UE. Il se concentre sur les principaux enjeux de l’intégration économique européenne. L’approche empirico-historique vise à déterminer l’impact réel des institutions et des politiques européennes en dépassant les lieux communs que ceux-ci proviennent de discours officiels ou de démagogies pro-européennes et eurosceptiques. Elle permet de mettre en évidence les véritables moteurs de la dynamique d’intégration économique qui transforme l’économie européenne depuis plus d’un siècle. Le premier chapitre définit ce qu’est l’intégration économique et les différentes manières de la mesurer. Il vise à donner certains outils nécessaires à la compréhension de la dynamique d’intégration économique européenne au cours du xxe siècle et des obstacles qui subsistent au sein de l’UE. Les trois chapitres suivants retracent les grandes étapes de l’intégration de l’économie européenne des origines à nos jours. Cette partie ne se cantonne pas à une description historique, mais développe des concepts économi

Alors que la plupart des gouvernements européens s’apprêtent à augmenter significativement les dépenses militaires pour faire face à un gouvernement russe considéré comme imprévisible, peu d’analyses dans les médias et think-tanks occidentaux tentent de recontextualiser l’invasion de l’Ukraine par le gouvernement Poutine et d’en comprendre les motifs socio-économiques sous-jacents. Comme souvent, la grande majorité des analyses mettent en avant des motifs historiques et géopolitiques. Certaines mettent en évidence le fait que l’Ukraine du haut moyen-âge est considérée par des historiens nationalistes russes comme le berceau de la civilisation russe, d’autres que la Crimée est une base militaire de première importance pour le contrôle de la Mer Noire et que l’absence d’un corridor terrestre entre 2014 et 2022 rendait son administration très couteuse pour le gouvernement russe . Depuis 2014, les gouvernements ukrainiens ont reçu de nombreux conseillers et équipements américains, facilitant une potentielle coordination de l’armée ukrainienne avec les forces de l’OTAN qui s’est traduite par des manœuvres conjointes en 2021. Malgré les dénégations de Washington, les dirigeants russes pouvaient croire à un rapprochement, voire à une adhésion de l’Ukraine à l’OTAN à court terme. Pour Moscou, Washington poursuit depuis trente ans une politique d’expansion orientale de l’OTAN pour encercler la Russie, n’hésitant pas à revenir sur des promesses passées . Les problèmes socio-économiques et la fragilisation politique des gouvernements occidentaux, notamment aux Etats-Unis (de plus en plus isolationniste) suite à deux années de pandémie ont également pu laisser croire à Poutine et à ses conseillers que les Etats-Unis et leurs alliés de l’OTAN seraient incapables de réagir à une guerre éclair. En quelques jours, le Kremlin présenterait comme un fait accompli la mise en place d’un régime fantoche sous le contrôle de Moscou et des gains territoriaux dans le Donbass et dans le corri

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We proposed a research model that examined the differences between the contributions of large, third-party e-commerce platforms and self-operated e-commerce platforms to businesses’ resilience to the COVID-19 shock. The difference-in-differences approach was employed to analyze a substantial sample of Chinese retailers. The study found that (1) under the baseline condition, the large, third-party e-commerce platforms built significant resilience for the brick-and-mortar businesses, (2) resource constraints induced by factor immobility weakened the contribution of large, third-party e-commerce platforms to the businesses’ resilience in regions of severe shock, and (3) the physical retailers’ self-operated EC platforms built resilience in regions of severe shock., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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Using a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms covering the 1990-2017 period, I show that firms acquired by multinational enterprises start investing in industrial robots, which leads to a reduction of the labor share at the firm and industry levels. The results are explained by a model of robot adoption and are robust to accounting for selection into multinational ownership. The estimates imply that, without multinationals and robots, the manufacturing labor share would be at its level of two decades ago. These findings shed new light on how globalization and technological change jointly shape the decline in the labor share., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

We study the feasibility, challenges, and potential benefits of adding a lottery component to standard negotiated and rule-based procurement procedures. For negotiated procedures, we introduce a “discrete lottery” in which local bureaucrats negotiate with a small number of selected bidders and a lottery decides who is awarded the contract. We show that the discrete lottery performs better than a standard negotiated procedure when the pool of firms to choose from is large and corruption is high. For rule-based auction procedures, we introduce a “third-price lottery” in which the two highest bidders are selected with equal probability and the project is contracted at a price corresponding to the third highest bid. We show that the third-price lottery reduces the risks from limited liability and renegotiation. It performs better than a standard second-price or ascending auction when the suppliers’ pool size, the risk of cost overrun, delays and non-delivery of the project are high. The choice between a second-price auction, a third price lottery and a lottery amongst all bidders also depends on the weight placed on producer surplus, including for instance the desire to increase the participation of local SMEs in public sector services markets., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This paper analyzes the subsequent steps of the covid vaccine experience in the European Union. It stresses the features of the US innovation ecosystem which were responsible for its success. It argues that the European Union did reasonably well in procuring vaccines and logistically organizing their delivery but that vaccine hesitancy proved to be a key constraint. The paper discusses European countries’ vaccination strategies and their plusses and minusses. Finally, it draws some lessons for dealing with the tradeoff between drug and vaccine innovation and affordability, an issue whose importance is bound to grow with promising but costly scientific advances., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Using a panel of about 4000 large multinational companies, this research provides regression-based evidence of revenue enhancement by the adoption of flexible work practices, that are closely related to complementary investment in technology- based support and to new organizational, and human care, design. Those complements are key to make flexible work practice stick as productive in the “future of work”, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The note presents a simpler alternative to the Modified Herfindahl-Hirschman Index to measure the risks of market concentration in the presence of common owners such as institutional investors owning shares in multiple firms expected to compete in the same market. This new measure, the Amplified Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, delivers the same insights as the MHHI but is less data intensive and less sensitive to outliers. It thus offers a more “user friendly” and more precise alternative to competition and regulatory agencies as a decision trigger for more detailed investigations of market power risks associated with the growing presence of common ownership., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This PhD thesis focuses on the socioeconomic determinants of health outcomes and drug consumption, the evaluation of policy levers aimed at limiting inappropriate pharmaceuticals’ use, as well as the role played by pharmaceutical advertising in the healthcare sector. The thesis is broadly divided into two parts. The first part investigates how socioeconomic disparities are empirically related to the spread of an infectious disease, the COVID-19 pandemic (Chapter 1), as well as consumption of potentially addictive medicines, as given by opioid pain-relievers (Chapter 2). The second part analyses the impact of laws restricting access to narcotic medications. The focus here is on Codeine-containing products, classified as mild opioids. I show how the impact of this type of policies varies depending on the socioeconomic environment in which they are applied in Chapter 3. Chapter 4, instead, studies how pharmaceutical companies reallocate their advertising expenses across geographical areas following the implementation of such policies and how this, in turn, affects sales. This research is primarily empirical and policy-oriented, even though one of my projects includes a theoretical component. The empirical analyses rely on the use of French data collected from several sources., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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The “softwarisation” of our economies has continued unabated since Marc Andreessen’s note in its article in 2011 “Why software is eating the world” interview within the Wall Street Journal. Along this softwarisation trend, other major underlying changes have also been underway, but 5 tipping points have been recently reached that make AI is the one trend that will keep Andreessen’s prediction much alive., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Andy Grove, then CEO of Intel, concluded that “(…) bad companies are destroyed by crises, great companies are improved by them”[1], after the company solved the flow bug of its flagship Pentium microprocessor, and went on to redesign its Intel Inside program to dominate the market. More than ever, corporate leaders may also feel the need for resilience, given the broad array of turbulence, but the twist, as Grove said, is that leaders should exploit the complementarities between resilience and performance. This flying wheel is half the journey between turning a bad or great company, we find in our analysis of large corporations during the covid-19 pandemic., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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2021-6109397-07/10/2021, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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As digital technologies emerge and improve rapidly, firms face changing tradeoffs in terms of their technology infrastructure and strategic direction. Hence, many of them adopt new digital technology and develop new business models and strategies. The literature on strategic alignment of IT suggests that firms need to synchronize these different domains of choice. We therefore, ask how far firms renew their strategy as they adopt new technologies. In this article, we study this question empirically by assessing if the adoption of new digital technologies is associated with, or even leads to, changes to firm strategy using a detailed survey-based dataset on firms’ strategy renewal and their adoption of digital technologies. We observe a strong positive association between the extent of strategy change and the stage of adoption of advanced digital technologies overall, suggesting a tight coupling between (technological) structure and strategy. Further, using instrumental variable regressions to disentangle the two effects, we find that the adoption of new technologies may lead to a large and robust effect on strategy change: the more extensive the adoption, the larger the change in strategy. This result is robust to various specifications and across industries. However, we notice substantial differences across technologies, potentially pointing at heterogeneity in their strategic nature or maturity level., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

We study corporate resilience during the Covid-19 pandemic for a sample of 4100 large global firms (mode: 1-10 billion USD revenue) using a large set of machine learning techniques. As per Hamel and Valikangas (2003), we find that both traits of innovations, as well as of organizational agility (Teece et al. 2016), drive the firm's post-Covid rebound. Remarkably, the Covid-19 pandemic is also exhibiting two extra traits among covid-19 resilient firms: they are consolidating their play in business ecosystems, while they are engaged in a “twin transformation” of digitization and sustainability. In general, also the way corporations play those traits matters, i.e. orchestrating the business ecosystems, engaging in disruptive (as opposed to incremental) innovation, and transforming at scale to boost resilience. Finally, there is a large complementarity among “resilience” traits, boosting the probability of resilience by close to 40% versus the sum of only the direct effects.JEL-codes: L25, M15, M21, 033, I101. Introduction, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

When alternative market institutions are available, traders have to decide both where and how much to trade. We conducted an experiment where traders decided first whether to trade in an (efficient) double-auction institution or in a posted-offers one (favoring sellers), and second how much to trade. When sellers face decreasing returns to scale (increasing production costs), fast coordination on the double-auction occurs, with the posted-offers institution becoming inactive. In contrast, under constant returns to scale, both institutions remain active and coordination is slower. The reason is that sellers trade off higher efficiency in a market with dwindling profits for biased-up profits in a market with vanishing customers. Hence, efficiency alone might not be sufficient to guarantee coordination on a single market institution if the surplus distribution is asymmetric. Trading behavior approaches equilibrium predictions (market clearing) within each institution, but switching behavior across institutions is explained by simple rules of thumb, with buyers chasing low prices and sellers considering both prices and trader ratios., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published