This paper examines the effects of providing broadband to schools on students' performance. We use a rich panel of data on broadband use and students' grades from all middle schools in Portugal. Employing a first-differences specification to control for school-specific unobserved effects and instrumenting the quality of broadband to account for unobserved time-varying effects, we show that high levels of broadband use in schools were detrimental for grades on the ninth-grade national exams in Portugal. For the average broadband use in schools, grades reduced 0.78 of a standard deviation from 2005 to 2009. We also show that broadband has a negative impact on exam scores regardless of gender, subject, or school quality and that the way schools allow students to use the Internet affects their performance. In particular, students in schools that block access to websites such as YouTube perform relatively better. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1770 . This paper was accepted by Lorin Hitt, information systems.
We propose a new strategy for proactive churn management that actively uses social network information to help retain consumers. We collaborate with a major telecommunications provider to design, deploy and analyze the outcomes of a randomized control trial at the household level to evaluate the effectiveness of this strategy. A random subset of likely churners were selected to be called by the firm. We also randomly selected whether their friends would be called. We find that listing likely churners to be called reduced their propensity to churn by 1.9 percentage points from a baseline of 17.2%. When their friends were also listed to be called their likelihood of churn reduced an additional 1.3 percentage points. The NPV of likely churners increased 2.1% with traditional proactive churn management and this statistic becomes 6.4% when their friends were also listed to be called by the firm. We show that in our setting likely churners receive a signal from their friends that reduces churn among the former. We also discuss how this signal may trigger mechanisms akin to both financial comparisons and conformity that may explain our findings.
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