We examine the factors underlying buyer demand for large Information Technology solutions in order to understand the competitive crash in large scale commercial computing. We examine individual buyer data from two periods. The first is in the mid 1980's, late in the period of a mature and stable...

We examine the factors underlying buyer demand for large Information Technology solutions in order to understand the competitive crash in large scale commercial computing. We examine individual buyer data from two periods. The first is in the mid 1980's, late in the period of a mature and stable...

October 1997, (Forthcoming, American Economic Review) <p> The government's incentives to bail out inefficient projects are determined by the tradeoff between political benefits and economic costs, the latter depending on the decentralization of government. Two effects of federalism are derived:...</p>