In early 1974, I was visiting the Watson Research Center and I got the idea of calling GSdel on the phone. I picked up the phone and called and GSdel answered the phone. I said, "Professor GSdel, I 'm fascinated by your incompleteness theorem. I have a new proof based on the Berry paradox that I 'd like to tell you about." GSdel said, "It doesn't mat ter which paradox you use." He had used a pa...

IT productivity paradox is one of the biggest debates in the IS literature. Even though, recent studies have identified the theoretical and methodological errors that cause this paradox, we still don’t fully understand how IT investment influences overall firm performance. This paper presents an empirical study that examines the influences of IT investment on firm performance. More importantly,...

Chen (2001) coined the term ‘digital preservation paradox’ to describe a philosophy of preservation management that recognises change as a cornerstone of managing digital records for permanence. Paradox also surrounds use of the terms ‘structured’ and ‘unstructured’. As more and more so-called ‘unstructured’ information sources are generated from ‘structured’ repositories, preservation planning...

Implementing IT (information technology) systems such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) requires huge investments. Measuring the impact of these investments on productivity and profitability is extremely important for business managers. Many studies have failed to show the direct relationship between IT investments, organizational productivity and profitability, a phenomenon known as produc...

At the heart of the global economy today is a troubling paradox: the productivity of advanced manufacturing promises to raise living standards while fierce world-wide competition for jobs threatens to undercut wages and working conditions. How does one resolve this paradox? The short answer is not easily! That said, my goals in this paper are more modest: to provide fresh perspectives on the te...

Learning Objectives After studying this chapter, you will be able to: Identify the major aspects of the economics of information technology. Explain and discuss the productivity paradox. Describe approaches for evaluating IT investment and explain why it is difficult to do it. Understand the nature of intangible benefits and the approaches to deal with such benefits. List and briefly describe t...

The debate on deindustrialization assumes that domestic industry is a leading sector and produces positive externalities for the whole economy. This paper will partially refute this. Since the early 1990’s, most developed and emerging economies have been subjected to two paradoxes: the paradox of Solow, which calls into question the relationship between ICT investment and productivity gains, an...

Two losing gambling games, when alternated in a periodic or random fashion, can produce a winning game. This paradox has been inspired by certain physical systems capable of rectifying fluctuations: the so-called Brownian ratchets. In this paper we review this paradox, from Brownian ratchets to the most recent studies on collective games, providing some intuitive explanations of the unexpected ...

In studying the early history of mathematical logic and set theory one typically reads that Georg Cantor discovered the so-called Burali-Forti (BF) paradox sometime in 1895, and that he offered his solution to it in his famous 1899 letter to Dedekind.! This account, however, leaves it something of a mystery why Cantor never discussed the paradox in his writings. Far from regarding the foundatio...