Gig platforms seek to create income opportunities, particularly for socially and economically marginalized people who find it challenging to engage in regular employment. Alongside this empowerment, safety concerns over unregulated drivers for Transportation Network Companies (TNC) platforms such as Uber and Lyft have led to discourse among policymakers on the necessity of background check laws (BCLs) with different stringency to exclude individuals from TNC jobs. Drawing on theories of labeling, routine activity, and rational choice theory, we conceptualize a trilogy of guardians—the government, TNC platforms and community, to safeguard ridesharing while mitigating social costs from excluding marginalized citizens from TNC jobs. Empirically, we document the shifting of crimes into the property domain as an unintended consequence of the exclusion solution (i.e., BCLs by the government). We find digital safety technologies deployed by TNC platforms to deter crimes (i.e., in-app safety features) can serve as an alternative to BCLs. Moreover, we show that resources provided by the community can inhibit the negative impacts of exclusion by stringent BCL (i.e., through alternative income sources) and enable the effectiveness of deterrence by in-app safety features (i.e., through policing). Our study surfaces a holistic social justice assessment that involves examining the risks of excluding marginalized individuals from gig work and showing that digital technologies expand the solution space to achieve public safety of citizens and inclusivity in gig employment through enabling the role of each guardian as well as their interdependence.

Hospitals have implemented health information technology (HIT) for clinical care to address rising operating costs in recent years. We integrate behavioral and institutional perspectives to explain how hospitals differentiate technological search relative to industry peers (i.e., search differentiation) for HIT portfolios. In the context of the U.S. healthcare industry, we theorize that hospitals’ search differentiation for HIT results jointly from idiosyncratic learning in response to cost-based performance shortfalls and isomorphic pressures in relation to changing policy uncertainty as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act has unfolded. Based on a panel data set from 3,319 hospitals in 2007–2014, we demonstrate that when costs increase relative to aspiration level, a hospital differentiates its search for HIT by exploring more novel technologies for clinical care relative to peers. As policy uncertainty declines from the conceptualization phase to the enactment phase of the HITECH Act, a hospital’s search differentiation for HIT increases to a greater extent in response to cost-based performance shortfalls as lower uncertainty reduces the need to imitate peers’ search. As policy uncertainty further declines from the enactment phase to the enforcement phase of the HITECH Act and reaches its lowest level, however, the hospital’s search differentiation for HIT increases to a smaller extent in response to cost-based performance shortfalls because of policy incentives and professional norms to promote implementation of common technologies. Overall, we provide a more holistic picture of how uncertainty in a dynamic regulatory context intertwines with organizational learning from performance feedback in shaping search differentiation.

Prior research has differentiated intrafirm information technology (IT) capabilities that reduce internal coordination costs and interfirm IT capabilities that reduce external transaction costs. However, the influence of developing these capabilities on business value has not been explored in the realm of institutional governance—the regulatory context that defines the rules of the game for firms. We suggest that the value of a firm’s investments in different types of IT capabilities development (ITCD) is evaluated by the financial market contingent on the firm’s regulatory context. Our study is situated in the U.S. electric utility industry undergoing a market restructuring process to understand the impacts of intrafirm and interfirm ITCD on market value conditional on a firm’s regulatory context characterized by the extent to which its business is located in states that allow consumer choice (i.e., deregulation), as well as the extent to which its business is located in states that deliberate regulations regarding price control, value chain configuration, and information control (i.e., regulatory uncertainty). We find that intrafirm ITCD for enhancing efficiency is rewarded in a firm’s market valuation under a high level of deregulation. We further find that under a high level of regulatory uncertainty, interfirm ITCD for fostering flexibility can hedge against regulatory uncertainty and increase firm value. A key contribution of our work is demonstrating external institutional governance can influence the market value that firms accrue from different types of ITCD, thereby elaborating the complementarity in theoretical explanations of IT capabilities and institutional governance.

Software is the foundation of the digital economy. The scope of software patent protection and the social and private value of software patenting are hence central to recent policy debates. The landmark 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Alice Corp v. CLS Bank had a profound impact on software patenting, drastically narrowing the scope of patent protection on software innovation. We theorize and provide empirical evidence that a narrower scope of software patent protection is associated with a greater degree of open-source activities and improved sales in software firms. We also evaluate how individual firm’s ex ante software patent stock may moderate the proposed relationships. These findings offer insights into the roles of patent scope for software innovation in the digital economy and have important implications for the software patent and digital innovation literatures. They also have compelling implications for patent policies on software and software-related inventions, such as artificial intelligence, blockchains, cloud computing, and other emerging digital innovations.