We empirically investigate whether business process reengineering (BPR), which requires substantial investment in information technology to integrate separate tasks into complete cross-functional processes, is associated with enhanced firm productivity and performance. We analyze firm-level panel data covering the period 1987–2008 using fixed effects and first differencing, standard methods that account for unobservable firm-level effects. We find that return on assets drops significantly during the project initiation year. According to fixed effects results, the performance and productivity measures improve in a decreasing manner after project initiation, suggesting that BPR indeed positively affects firm performance on average. We also find that enterprise-wide BPR projects are associated with more negative returns during project initiation than functionally focused projects. However, there is no clear evidence regarding their superiority over functionally focused BPR projects in terms of performance improvements after project initiation, perhaps because grand projects are risky and sometimes lead to grand failures.
Online intermediaries have recently started offering database services to donors and certification services to nonprofit organizations through the Internet. We conceptualize a donor-to-nonprofit (D2N) marketplace as an online intermediary that offers these two services and examine its effect on fund-raising strategies of nonprofit organizations using an analytical model based on spatial competition under incomplete information with donor search. We characterize the signaling equilibria where certification of quality conveys information about organizational effectiveness in generating socially valuable services. Interestingly, the emergence of the D2N marketplace may lead to a drop in total net fund-raising revenues in the market, despite the fact that the intermediary's database service eliminates search costs for some donors. We also explain why such a marketplace may deliberately lower the accuracy of its certification process.