Informational and Organizational Impacts on Productivity: The Economics of Control and Reliability in Complex Production Process

该项目提供了理论和计量经济学方法，用于分析先进的信息技术以及使用这些技术的组织结构如何影响现代、复杂的工业生产设施。这项研究的重点是现有生产设施的生产率和可靠性，其最终目的是评估用于过程监测和控制的新技术对这两个量化绩效维度的影响。研究议程有三个要素。首先，它的目的是通过审查过程控制和组织设计的技术选择来推进生产系统的分析，这些技术将通过更广泛地使用复杂的信息技术来促进可靠性和生产率的改进。其次，它提出了与微观生产事件的经验观察更直接相关的生产理论的新公式。第三，该项目致力于通过具体应用其概念和方法研究来测试其概念和方法研究的有用性，研究组织和信息技术对经济上重要且文件特别丰富的行业--由美国电力公用事业公司运营的商业核电站--性能的影响。

This project provides theoretical and econometric methods for analyzing how advanced information technologies, and the structures of the organizations using them, affect the performance of modern, complex, industrial production facilities. The research focusses upon the productivity and reliability of established production facilities, and its ultimate aim is to assess the impacts of new technologies for process monitoring and control upon these two quantitative dimensions of performance. The research agenda has three elements. First, it aims to advance the analysis of production systems by examining the choices of techniques for process control and organizational design that would promote improvement sin reliability and productivity via more extensive uses of sophisticated information technology. Second, it proposes novel formulations of production theory that relate more directly to empirical observations of micro level production events. Third, the project undertakes to test the usefulness of its conceptual and methodological researches by applying these concretely, in a study of organizational and information-technology impacts on the performance of an economically important and exceptionally well-documented industry--commercial nuclear power plants operated by U.S. electric utility companies.