Relative Sizes of Information Technology Investments and Productive Efficiency: Their Linkage and Empirical Evidence

The contribution of information technology (IT) to organizational performance has been investigated extensively in recent IS research. A number of economic and financial measures have been employed by researchers to gauge the impact of IT on organizational performance. The results of previous research can be described as inconclusive at best. This paper uses stochastic frontiers to examine the relationship between the relative size of IT investments by firms and their productive efficiency in the production process. Assuming different production frontiers (including the popular generalized Cobb-Douglas, the more general Box-Cox transformation, and the most general Box-Tidwell transformation for the production process), we find consistent empirical evidence that the relative level of IT investments has a positive effect on the firm\u27s productive efficiency, implying that firms investing comparatively more in IT are likely to be more efficient in their production processes than those investing less. This study confirms the positive effect of IT on the firm\u27s efficiency in the production process, provides a source to explain the disappearance of the productivity paradox, and suggests a direction for future research that may integrate both economic and financial aspects of previous research on IT benefits

Search for displaced vertices arising from decays of new heavy particles in 7 TeV pp collisions at ATLAS

We present the results of a search for new, heavy particles that decay at a significant distance from their production point into a final state containing charged hadrons in association with a high-momentum muon. The search is conducted in a pp-collision data sample with a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 33 pb^-1 collected in 2010 by the ATLAS detector operating at the Large Hadron Collider. Production of such particles is expected in various scenarios of physics beyond the standard model. We observe no signal and place limits on the production cross-section of supersymmetric particles in an R-parity-violating scenario as a function of the neutralino lifetime. Limits are presented for different squark and neutralino masses, enabling extension of the limits to a variety of other models.Comment: 8 pages plus author list (20 pages total), 8 figures, 1 table, final version to appear in Physics Letters