Can low-cost comparative information trigger firms to improve the performance of a digital asset they already own? Using two large-scale randomised controlled trials with approximately 7000 UK firms in the distilling and retail sectors, we study whether peer benchmarking of website performance prompts measurable improvement. Firms receiving benchmarked website metrics and targeted recommendations exhibit modest average improvements, with more favourable effects among initially underperforming firms, consistent with partial convergence towards the industry frontier. The catch-up dynamic is strongest on mobile metrics, including as a spillover in the first experiment, in which reports contained desktop metrics only, a pattern consistent with firms focusing improvement efforts where performance gaps are greatest. Treated firms also show suggestive report-aligned increases in the adoption of mobile-optimisation and content-delivery technologies. These patterns are consistent with comparative performance information helping firms identify and respond to performance shortfalls. The findings position peer benchmarking as a scalable, low-cost instrument for narrowing the digital divide among SMEs: informational aspiration cues generate more favourable responses among firms furthest behind than among firms nearer the frontier.
The gender productivity gap — women's persistently lower research output relative to men — is a primary driver of gender inequality in science and technology careers, yet its causal origins remain incompletely understood. This study proposes a novel mechanism underlying the gender productivity gap: female researchers' greater differentiation from their academic mentors. Drawing on theories of creative atypicality among underrepresented minorities, I argue that in male-dominated fields, women diverge more from mentors' research agendas due to both discriminatory treatment and being less constrained by fields' mainstream paradigms. Because differentiation from mentors impedes research productivity, this divergence contributes to the gender productivity gap. An analysis of careers in information theory, a subfield of electrical engineering, showed that female researchers differentiated more from mentors than male researchers: a significantly larger share of their work was not co-authored with academic advisers, was published in different research domains, cited different antecedent work, and had co-authors outside the adviser's co-authorship network. Multivariate regression decomposition showed that all of these differences except the last accounted for a significant portion of the gender productivity gap. These findings hold after controlling for parenthood and domestic partnership. The study advances understanding of the relational origins of gender inequality in research careers and suggests targeted interventions to better integrate female doctoral students into mentors' research programs.
This study investigates the association between regional collaboration structures and the semantic position of locally produced scientific knowledge. Drawing on the Regional Innovation Systems framework, it distinguishes between intra-regional and inter-regional collaboration as complementary dimensions of scientific knowledge production. Using over nine million Web of Science publications from European regions between 1998 and 2021, this study employs semantic text embeddings to measure local knowledge divergence, defined as the semantic distance between each publication and the established regional knowledge base. Within the same region–field–period, externally collaborated publication groups exhibit slightly higher average local knowledge divergence than internally collaborated groups. However, the estimated difference is substantively negligible and varies across periods. The principal pooled-sample finding is an inverted U-shaped association between external collaboration share and regional local knowledge divergence, with the fitted curve reaching its maximum at an external collaboration share of approximately 45%. The realised magnitude of this association is modest, and heterogeneity analyses show that it is most pronounced in life sciences and biomedicine and after 2010. These findings identify a context-dependent association rather than a causal or universally optimal collaboration structure, demonstrating how regional scientific collaboration portfolios relate to the evolution of publicly disclosed knowledge trajectories.
Early regional adoption is crucial for platform-enabled innovations because their viability depends on enough people within a region adopting them to generate network effects. Existing research on regional innovation diffusion explains early adoption largely through demographic, economic, infrastructural, or institutional conditions, paying limited attention to regional population psychology. We conceptualize regional psychological openness as an invisible social infrastructure that is relevant for understanding early platform adoption. To test this idea, we introduce a newly curated dataset that allows us to trace the initial development of three major platform innovations (i.e., accommodation sharing platforms, ride-sharing platforms, social media platforms) across hundreds of U.S. metropolitan regions. Across all three platform types, regions differ markedly in early adoption. We link these adoption data to large-scale geo-referenced personality information from millions of U.S. residents (N = 3,234,899). Results show that regional psychological openness consistently predicts earlier uptake even after accounting for demographic, socio-economic, social, infrastructural, geographical, and other psychological characteristics. In sum, the study advances a behavioral perspective on regional innovation adoption by integrating population psychology into explanations of platform diffusion.
We explore the effects of different industrial policies in a macroeconomic agent-based model calibrated to reproduce the decline in US business dynamism over the last half-century. R&D subsidies to innovators raise GDP growth but exacerbate the trend toward rising market power, while financial subsidies to adopters and standard capital-replacement schemes have negligible aggregate effects. A meaningful reversal of market power emerges only when innovation support is paired with adoption-oriented measures that relax the knowledge constraints of small adopters, e.g. the establishment of a National Competence Center providing technology transfer and knowledge upgrading. The effectiveness of each policy is dependent on the underlying technological regime: the growth–dynamism trade-off is sharpest in science-based regimes and attenuated in scale-intensive and supplier-dominated ones.
