Finding the path(s) towards profitable e-commerce

Relying on a unique and arguably representative sample of transaction e-commerce companies, this paper takes a closer look at whether and how companies could be profitable on-line. This analysis clearly demonstrates that a non-trivial set of winners are emerging, which combine both strong operational excellence as well as fine-tuned to about 3 generic strategic postures. --E-tailing,Strategic Clusters,Post entry performance

Automatic improvement of apache spark queries using semantics-preserving program reduction

© 2016 ACM. Apache Spark is a popular framework for large-scale data analytics. Unfortunately, Spark's performance can be difficult to optimise, since queries freely expressed in source code are not amenable to traditional optimisation techniques. This article describes Hylas, a tool for automatically optimising Spark queries embedded in source code via the application of semantics-preserving transformations. The transformation method is inspired by functional programming techniques of "deforestation", which eliminate intermediate data structures from a computation. This contrasts with approaches defined entirely within structured query formats such as Spark SQL. Hylas can identify certain computationally expensive operations and ensure that performing them creates no superfluous data structures. This optimisation leads to significant improvements in execution time, with over 10,000 times improvement observed in some cases

"Attack or convert?": Early evidence from European on-line banking

Why are so many on-line banking ventures-start-ups and incumbents alike-foundering? An industry which can theoretically conduct such a high proportion of its transactions electronically would seem well suited to a rapid move on-line. Yet, the rate at which customers around the world are adopting Internet banking remains relatively low; and furthermore the capability to convert or acquire customers on-line varies enormously among banks.This paper attempts to analyze and compare possible drivers of customer acquisition and conversion for European on-line banking at the light of various theories of bank innovations. The econometric model is consistent with "pull" market features playing a significant role, but only for customer conversion .In contrast, bank-specific factors are largely the driver for on-line customer acquisition strategy, especially organizational link to on-line activities and bank size.All in all, this paper confirms that, consistent with the strategic management literature, an "attacker" versus "conversion" strategy obeys significantly different paths, but also that some banks are notably better in executing their strategy than others, on-line. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Does Generative AI generate jobs ?

The evolution of AI and its quick adoption by organisations has predisposed many workers to the fear of losing their jobs to the technology. This fear might be largely unfounded.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Artificial Intelligence, Its Corporate Use and How It Will Affect the Future of Work

In the current debate over the Future of Work, there is little discussion about how firms anticipate the evolution of their demand for labor and the related mix of skills as they adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. This article contributes to this debate by leveraging a global survey of 3000 firms in 10 countries, covering the main sectors of the economy. Descriptive statistics from the survey are complemented by econometric analyses of corporate labor demand decisions. The findings are four-fold. First, those are still early days in the absorption of AI technologies, with less than 10% of companies investing in a majority of AI technologies and for multiple purposes. Second, if an aggregate portion of firms anticipates reducing employment as a result of adopting AI technologies, as many other companies anticipate labor growth or reorganizing employment. Third, this reallocation picture holds true when we examine further demand by labor functions and skills, with talent shifting toward more analytic, creative, and interaction skills, and away from administrative and routine-based functions, in line with past trends of skill- and routine-biased technological change. Fourth, a novel to the literature on Future of Work, econometric results on employment change highlight that employment dynamics are driven by related spillover effects to product markets. Higher competition, larger expectations of market (share) deployment may counterbalance negative automation effect on employment dynamics.SCOPUS: cp.pDecretOANoAutActifinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Union-firm bargaining and imperfect product competition in Belgian manufacturing

Dissertn : Diss. doct

The power laws of enterprise 2.0

Parallel to the consumer social web, a myriad of companies are adopting social software either for internal or external collaboration with suppliers and customers. This article provides key stylized facts around the adoption, use and success of social software, a phenomenon dubbed "enterprise 2.0". We observe that social software usage within companies is heavily concentrated with a long tail companies claiming limited business use and success. The head of "enterprise 2.0" distribution, composed of a small hub of high performing companies, is to be found in some sectors like high-tech, but more crucially, the success is driven by debottlenecking of organizational barriers to fully exploit "enterprise 2.0" for improved economic performance. © 2010, IGI Global.SCOPUS: ch.binfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Capacity constraints and export performance: theory and evidence from Belgian manufacturing

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe