Digital Dark Matter and the Economic Contribution of Apache
36 Pages Posted: 5 Oct 2013 Last revised: 20 Oct 2024
Date Written: October 2013
Abstract
Researchers have long hypothesized that spillovers from government, university, and private company R&D contribute to economic growth, but these contributions may be difficult to measure when they take a non-pecuniary form. The growth of networking devices and the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s magnified these challenges, as illustrated by the deployment of the descendent of the NCSA HTTPd server, otherwise known as Apache. This study asks whether this experience could produce measurement issues in standard productivity analysis, specifically, omission and attribution issues, and, if so, whether the magnitude is large enough to matter. The study develops and analyzes a novel data set consisting of a 1% sample of all outward-facing web servers used in the United States. We find that use of Apache potentially accounts for a mismeasurement of somewhere between $2 billion and $12 billion, which equates to between1.3 percent and 8.7 percent of the stock of prepackaged software in private fixed investment in the United States. We argue that these findings point to a large potential undercounting of the rate or return from IT spillovers from the invention of the Internet, and to a large potential undercounting of "digital dark matter" in general.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
The Productivity of Information Technology Investments: New Evidence from IT Labor Data
By Prasanna Tambe and Lorin M. Hitt
-
Measuring R&D Spillovers: On the Importance of Geographic and Technological Proximity
-
Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance?
By Erik Brynjolfsson, Lorin M. Hitt, ...
-
Valuing IT-Related Intangible Assets
By Adam Saunders and Erik Brynjolfsson
-
Job Hopping, Information Technology Spillovers, and Productivity Growth
By Prasanna Tambe and Lorin M. Hitt
-
Human Capital Investments and Employee Performance: An Analysis of IT Services Industry
By Ravi Bapna, Nishtha Langer, ...
-
Geographic and Technological R&D Spillovers within the Triad: Micro Evidence from US Patents
By Luigi Aldieri and Michele Cincera
-
Measuring Information Technology Spillovers
By Prasanna Tambe and Lorin M. Hitt