Faithin Omaha eBook Collection

Download or read book Essays on Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Cont.) Essay 2: "Network Structure and Information Advantage: Structural Determinants of Access to Novel Information and their Performance Implications." I examine relationships between social network structure, information structure, and individual performance. I build and validate a Vector Space Model of information diversity, develop hypotheses linking two key aspects of network structure - size and diversity - to the distribution of novel information among actors, and test the theory using data on email communication patterns, message content and performance. Results indicate that access to diverse, novel information is related to network structure in non-linear ways, and that network diversity contributes to performance even when controlling for the positive performance effects of access to novel information, suggesting additional benefits to network diversity beyond those conferred through information advantage.