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ICT Adoption and Heterogeneity in Production Technologies: Evidence for Chilean Retailers *
Author(s) -
De Vries Gaaitzen J.,
Koetter Michael
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
oxford bulletin of economics and statistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.131
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1468-0084
pISSN - 0305-9049
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0084.2010.00622.x
Subject(s) - information and communications technology , production (economics) , frontier , business , set (abstract data type) , emerging technologies , industrial organization , stochastic frontier analysis , marketing , economics , microeconomics , computer science , geography , archaeology , artificial intelligence , world wide web , programming language
Abstract The adoption of information and communication technology (ICT) can have far‐reaching effects on the nature of production technologies. Because ICT adoption is incomplete, especially in developing countries, different groups of firms will have different production technologies. We estimate a latent class stochastic frontier model, which allows us to test for the existence of multiple production technologies across firms and consider the associated implications for efficiency measures. We use a unique data set of Chilean retailers, which includes detailed information on ICT adoption. We find three distinct production technologies. The probability of membership in a more productive group is positively related to ICT use.