Protecting the Confidentiality of Shared Information: Evidence from the Video Game Industry
Brett Massimino, John Gray, Kenneth K. Boyer · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2013
Firms often conduct business operations involving highly- sensitive, proprietary information from a variety of locations; doing so poses several challenges to the maintenance of information security, including the crossing of geographic, institutional, and cultural boundaries. Despite this, the influence of location decisions on the confidentiality of proprietary information remains a theoretically-underdeveloped and empirically-untested area. Employing a comprehensive series of longitudinal datasets, we examine the effects of local property rights and industrial agglomeration on the confidentiality of information that is shared among supply chain members. We do so by introducing a novel measure of project-level information confidentiality which leverages archival data from underground, black-market distribution channels. Surprisingly, we find that the strength of property rights protections, at both client and vendor locations, has very little relationship to the confidentiality of project-level information. However, we find that industrial agglomeration levels, at both client and vendor locations, relate to improved levels of information confidentiality. We further find that client-vendor geographic distance, language, and nationality differences moderate these positive benefits when agglomeration is measured at the location of the vendor. We relate these findings to a broad base of literatures, including information security, knowledge management, and industrial agglomeration.