Title
Strength in Numbers: How does data-driven decision-making affect firm performance?
Abstract
We examine whether performance is higher in firms that emphasize decisionmaking based on data and business analytics (which we term a data-driven decisionmaking approach or DDD). Using detailed survey data on the business practices and information technology investments of 179 large publicly traded firms, we find that firms that adopt DDD have output and productivity that is 5-6% higher than what would be expected given their other investments and information technology usage. Using instrumental variables methods, we find evidence that these effects do not appear to be due to reverse causality. Furthermore, the relationship between DDD and performance also appears in other performance measures such as asset utilization, return on equity and market value. Our results provide some of the first large scale data on the direct connection between data-driven decisionmaking and firm performance. Acknowledgements: We thank Andrew McAfee, Roger Robert, Johnson Sikes and participants at the Workshop for Information Systems and Economics and participants at the 9 th Annual Industrial Organization Conference for useful comments and the MIT Center for Digital Business for generous
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.2139/ssrn.1819486
ICIS
Keywords
Field
DocType
data,information technology,productivity
Return on equity,Survey data collection,Causality,Economics,Business analytics,Data-driven,Information technology,Instrumental variable,Market value,Marketing
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
37
5.55
21
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Erik Brynjolfsson12330286.58
Lorin M. Hitt22426223.11
Heekyung Kim3567.34