Using Contexts and Constraints for Improved Geotagging of Human Trafficking Webpages

Extracting geographical tags from webpages is a well-motivated application in many domains. In illicit domains with unusual language models, like human trafficking, extracting geotags with both high precision and recall is a challenging problem. In this paper, we describe a geotag extraction framework in which context, constraints and the openly available Geonames knowledge base work in tandem in an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model to achieve good performance. In preliminary empirical investigations, the framework improves precision by 28.57% and F-measure by 36.9% on a difficult human trafficking geotagging task compared to a machine learning-based baseline. The method is already being integrated into an existing knowledge base construction system widely used by US law enforcement agencies to combat human trafficking.Comment: 6 pages, GeoRich 2017 workshop at ACM SIGMOD conferenc

What Firms Make vs. What They Know: How Firms\u27 Production and Knowledge Boundaries Affect Competitive Advantage in the Face of Technological Change

Product innovation often hinges on technological changes in underlying components and architectures, requiring extensive coordination between upstream component development tasks and downstream product development tasks. We explore how differences in the ways in which firms are organized with respect to components affect their ability to manage technological change. We consider how firms are organized in terms of both division of labor and division of knowledge. We categorize product innovations according to whether they are enabled by changes in components or by changes in architectures. We test our predictions in the context of the global dynamic random access memory industry from 1974 to 2005, during which it transitioned through 12 distinct product generations. We find that vertically integrated firms had, on average, a faster time to market for new product generations than nonintegrated firms. The performance benefit that firms derived from vertical integration was greater when the new product generation was enabled by architectural change than when it was enabled by component change. We also find that although many nonintegrated firms extended their knowledge boundaries by developing knowledge of outsourced components, the performance benefits from such knowledge mostly accrued to “fully nonintegrated” firms (i.e., those that did not vertically integrate into any upstream component), rather than “partially integrated” firms (i.e., those that vertically integrated into some components but not others). Our study makes a strong case for the value of integrating the knowledge- and governance-based theoretical perspectives to broaden our examination of how firms organize for innovation and to uncover the technological and organizational sources of performance heterogeneity

Persistence of Integration in the Face of Specialization: How Firms Navigated the Winds of Disintegration and Shaped the Architecture of the Semiconductor Industry

Although the stylized model of industry evolution suggests that firms transform from vertical integration to specialization over time, many industries still exhibit a continued persistence of integrated firms. In exploring this puzzle, I draw on detailed firm-level data from the semiconductor industry to analyze how integrated incumbents, beyond shifting to the specialized mode, reconfigured in the face of industry’s vertical disintegration so as to coexist with the specialized firms. I propose and find that the incumbents who persist with vertical integration increase their emphasis on systemic innovations and transact with specialized firms in both upstream and intermediate markets. The value-creating opportunities associated with integrated incumbents’ leveraging (a) their relative superiority in developing systemic innovations and (b) markets to pursue a broader menu of transactional choices may offset their costs of staying integrated. These firm-level factors also determine the pattern of industry’s vertical disintegration and the extent of coexistence between integrated and specialized firms

Innovation Ecosystems and the Pace of Substitution: Re-Examining Technology S-Curves

Why do some new technologies emerge and quickly supplant incumbent technologies while others take years or decades to take off? We explore this question by presenting a framework that considers both the focal competing technologies as well as the ecosystems in which they are embedded. Within our framework, each episode of technology transition is characterized by the ecosystem emergence challenge that confronts the new technology and the ecosystem extension opportunity that is available to the old technology. We identify four qualitatively distinct regimes with clear predictions for the pace of substitution. Evidence from 10 episodes of technology transitions in the semiconductor lithography equipment industry from 1972 to 2009 offers strong support for our framework. We discuss the implication of our approach for firm strategy

Sustaining Superior Performance in Business Ecosystems: Evidence From Application Software Developers in the iOS and Android Smartphone Ecosystems

We study the phenomenon of business ecosystems in which platform firms orchestrate the functioning of ecosystems by providing platforms and setting the rules for participation by complementor firms. We develop a theoretical framework to explain how the structural and evolutionary features of the ecosystem may shape the extent to which participating complementor firms can sustain their superior performance. The structural feature, which we refer to as ecosystem complexity, is a function of the number of unique components or subsystems that interact with the complementor’s product. We incorporate the evolutionary features by considering the role of generational transitions initiated by platform firms over time as well as the role of complementors’ ecosystem-specific experience. Evidence from Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android smartphone ecosystems supports our arguments that higher ecosystem complexity helps app developers sustain their superior performance, and that this effect is stronger for more experienced firms. In contrast, platform transitions initiated by Apple and Google make it more difficult for app developers to sustain their performance superiority, and that this effect is exacerbated by the extent of ecosystem complexity. The study offers a novel account of how the performance of complementor firms in platform-based business ecosystems may be shaped by their ecosystem-level interdependencies

Value Creation in Innovation Ecosystems: How the Structure of Technological Interdependence Affects Firm Performance in New Technology Generations

The success of an innovating firm often depends on the efforts of other innovators in its environment. How do the challenges faced by external innovators affect the focal firm\u27s outcomes? To address this question we first characterize the external environment according to the structure of interdependence. We follow the flow of inputs and outputs in the ecosystem to distinguish between upstream components that are bundled by the focal firm, and downstream complements that are bundled by the firm\u27s customers. We hypothesize that the effects of external innovation challenges depend not only on their magnitude, but also on their location in the ecosystem relative to the focal firm. We identify a key asymmetry that results from the location of challenges relative to a focal firm—greater upstream innovation challenges in components enhance the benefits that accrue to technology leaders, while greater downstream innovation challenges in complements erode these benefits. We further propose that the effectiveness of vertical integration as a strategy to manage ecosystem interdependence increases over the course of the technology life cycle. We explore these arguments in the context of the global semiconductor lithography equipment industry from its emergence in 1962 to 2005 across nine distinct technology generations. We find strong empirical support for our framework

Coordinating and Competing in Ecosystems: How Organizational Forms Shape New Technology Investments

We consider firms in the context of their business ecosystems and explore how differences in the ways in which firms are organized with respect to complementary activities affect their decision to invest in new technologies. We argue that, in addition to creating differences in incentives and bureaucratic costs, firm-complementor organizational form plays an important role in the firm\u27s ability to coordinate accompanying changes in complementary activities so as to shape the benefits from investing early in the new technology. We test our predictions in the U.S. healthcare industry from 1995–2006. The study makes a strong case for viewing firms\u27 competitive strategies in the context of their business ecosystems and for the existence of an important link between firms\u27 coordination choices and their strategic investments

The Impact of Labor Regulations on Jobs and Wages in India: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

In this paper we examine the impact of India's labor regulations on employment and wages through the lens of the apparel and textiles industry, India’s largest manufacturing employer. In addition to exploiting cross-state variation in labor regulations, we take advantage of the 2005 abolition of quota restrictions on developing countries’ exports of apparel and textiles products to the developed world and use this as a natural experiment to identify the effects of labor regulations. Employing a difference-in-difference strategy, we find economically and statistically significant gains in post-2005 employment and wage in the apparel and textiles industry in states that maintained more flexible labor regulations as compared to states with inflexible regulations. These gains are either absent or muted in the case of labor intensive industries other than apparel and textiles