| This dissertation consists of three essays that investigate the relationship between ownership structure and business value of IT in two interorganizational contexts: interorganizational systems (IOS) and IT outsourcing. The first study analyzes a case of IOS in financial risk management and develops a game-theoretic model to understand the impact of ownership change in the IOS, from the ownership by a financial institution to third-party ownership. I analyze how the ownership change affects the service provider's investment in the system quality and the risk of exploitation of clients' information. One of the key results is that the third-party ownership increases the service quality of the IOS and mitigates the risk of information exploitation, which leads to greater adoption of the service even if the service is no longer free.; The second essay addresses a more general question: "How should we go about deciding the value-maximizing optimal ownership structure of IOS?" I focus on the role of two key factors derived from the theory of incomplete contracts and transaction costs economics: the relative importance of investment and the specificity of investments related to IT assets. I develop an analytical model to examine how these two factors affect IOS participants' investments and optimal ownership structures. The analysis shows that as specificity of investments becomes lower, relative importance of investments becomes an even more critical determinant of optimal IOS ownership structures. In addition, the analysis reveals that under certain conditions IOS ownership may have a negative impact on the owner's investment incentives.; The third essay empirically estimates the economic contributions of IT outsourcing using US industry-level data. Employing the production function framework, I treat IT outsourcing as a factor input in production process, and estimate the output contributions of IT outsourcing. The results indicate that IT outsourcing has made significant contributions to output growth in the US industries. The most significant result is that there seem to be systematic differences in the way IT outsourcing is used by industries, depending on the relative IT intensity of industries. |
