Lorin M. Hitt
· Professor of Operations, Information and DecisionsUniversity of Pennsylvania · Operations and Information Management
Active 1993–2024
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About
Lorin M. Hitt is the Zhang Jindong Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. His central research area focuses on the relationship between information technology and productivity, emphasizing the factors that influence the value of IT investments. His recent work investigates the role of complementary factors such as organizational design and human capital in enhancing IT value, with particular interest in IT deployment within healthcare. Hitt's research also explores electronic business, competition in electronic markets, the value proposition of online delivery systems, switching costs, and the impact of recommender systems on consumer behavior. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in information systems management, economics, and data analysis, including the undergraduate core class in OPIM. In addition to his academic pursuits, Hitt consults and conducts research on IT outsourcing agreements, evaluation methods for IT investments, and other topics at the intersection of information systems, economics, and econometrics. He occasionally serves as an expert witness in litigation related to information technology and consumer industries. His work has contributed significantly to understanding how data analytics, organizational structure, and human capital influence innovation, productivity, and the economic impact of IT investments.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Business
- Data Mining
- Sociology
- Marketing
- Economics
- Finance
- Computer Science
- Mathematics
- Econometrics
Selected publications
Data Analytics, Innovation, and Firm Productivity
Management Science · 2019-10-15 · 335 citations
articleWe examine the relationship between data analytics capabilities and innovation using detailed firm-level data. To measure innovation, we first utilize a survey to capture two types of firm practices, process improvement and new technology development for 331 firms. We then use patent data to further analyze new technology development for a broader sample of more than 2,000 publicly traded firms. We find that data analytics capabilities are more likely to be present and are more valuable in firms…
The Impact of E-Visits on Visit Frequencies and Patient Health: Evidence from Primary Care
Management Science · 2018-02-05 · 253 citations
articleOpen accessSecure messaging, or "e-visits," between patients and providers has sharply increased in recent years, and many hope they will help improve healthcare quality, while increasing provider capacity. Using a panel data set from a large healthcare system in the United States, we find that e-visits trigger about 6% more office visits, with mixed results on phone visits and patient health. These additional visits come at the sacrifice of new patients: physicians accept 15% fewer new patients each month…
Data Analytics Supports Decentralized Innovation
Management Science · 2019-07-02 · 213 citations
articleSenior authorData-analytics technology can accelerate the innovation process by enabling existing knowledge to be identified, accessed, combined, and deployed to address new problem domains. However, like prior advances in information technology, the ability of firms to exploit these opportunities depends on a variety of complementary human capital and organizational capabilities. We focus on whether analytics is more valuable in firms where innovation within a firm has decentralized groups of inventors or c…
Digital Capital and Superstar Firms
National Bureau of Economic Research · 2020-12-01 · 138 citations
reportOpen accessGeneral purpose technologies like information technology typically require complementary firmspecific investments to create value. These complementary investments produce a form of capital, which is typically intangible and which we call digital capital. We create an extended firm-level panel on IT labor investments (1990-2016) using data from LinkedIn. We then apply Hall's Quantity Revelation Theorem to compute both prices and quantities of digital capital over recent decades. We find that 1) d…
Health Care Information Technology, Work Organization, and Nursing Home Performance
Industrial and Labor Relations Review · 2016-03-31 · 51 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingThe authors investigate whether electronic medical record (EMR) systems are associated with higher levels of nursing home performance. Their difference-in-differences analysis is based on a survey of health care information technology (HIT) use in approximately 304 New York State nursing homes, combined with regulatory data from the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Studies (CMS) Nursing Home Compare database and the New York State RHCF-4 financial reports. For nursing home owners, the authors fi…
Recent grants
Frequent coauthors
- 47 shared
Prasanna Tambe
University of Pennsylvania
- 42 shared
Erik Brynjolfsson
National Bureau of Economic Research
- 17 shared
Lynn Wu
University of Pennsylvania
- 12 shared
Eric K. Clemons
- 10 shared
Fujie Jin
Indiana University Bloomington
- 7 shared
Bowen Lou
- 6 shared
Yili Hong
University of Miami
- 5 shared
Xue Mei
United Imaging Healthcare (China)
Labs
Operations, Information and Decisions DepartmentPI
Education
- 1996
Ph.D. Management
MIT
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