For example, a survey conducted in 2003 by the Institute of Supply Management and Forrester Research found that most  6  4  See Basu and Fernald (2001) for a discussion. BIS Review 4/2005  managers consider their company to be at a relatively early stage in exploiting the potential gains from using the Internet for their purchasing activities.
In a more formal analysis, Jason Cummins and Giovanni Violante constructed a measure of the “technological gap” in U.S. industry, defined as the difference in efficiency between state-of-the-art capital equipment and the actual mix of equipment held by firms (Cummins and Violante, 2002).