The Complexity of Outsourced Services and the Role of International Business Travel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Face-to-face communication between international business partners is a valuable mechanism for reducing transaction costs, even in contexts where electronic communication is pervasive. This paper empirically examines whether face-to-face interactions (as measured by international business travel) have greater impacts where transaction costs are higher, e.g. where services with greater complexity are outsourced offshore. Matching data from the Survey of International Air Travelers with Bureau of Economic Analysis data on US service outsourcing, we find that international business travel has a significantly positive impact on service outsourcing, and that this impact is significantly larger for outsourcing more complex services. We further provide more evidence on the role of international business travel by showing that: (a) business travel by managers leads to relatively more outsourcing; (2) business travel by non-diasporas leads to relatively more outsourcing; (3) the role of international business travel remains the same before and after the digital revolution. All these findings are supported by IV estimation where we use leisure travel or terrorism incidents as instruments for business travel.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".