Information Economics and Policy最新文献

Recent U.S. broadband programs prioritize high-speed infrastructure with download speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps) or more. Some internet providers have already built broadband networks capable of gigabit speeds (1000 Mbps) and more of this infrastructure is likely forthcoming due to increased federal support. The availability of this “ultra-fast” internet may have important implications for business creation. Business-level data from Data Axle is combined with the Federal Communication Commission's Form 477 broadband availability data and aggregated to the census block group level to form a six-year panel from 2015 to 2020. We examine the effects of three thresholds of broadband speed availability on business births per 10,000 population in eight U.S. states using an event study design. Results suggest that 100+ Mbps availability increases business births for at least up to five years after being introduced. The impacts are largest in metro block groups and for select industries. Relative to block groups treated at the 100 Mbps level, access to 250 Mbps shows additional benefits for business creation; however, the results for gigabit speed provision are less conclusive. This may change as technology continues to evolve and ultra-fast speed becomes more necessary for business operations.

Agency and wholesale models are widely adopted vertical contractual agreements. This paper compares the private incentives and social welfare of these two business models by highlighting the differences in move order and price structure. With a monopoly platform, the agency model dominates the wholesale model with respect to social welfare and the platform's profit if and only if demand is subconvex. With duopoly platforms, having both platforms adopt the agency model is socially desirable, and it is a dominant-strategy Nash equilibrium if demand is weakly convex. Our findings have novel theoretical contributions and offer insights into some influential antitrust cases.

We consider a duopoly model with history-based price discrimination where firms inherit asymmetric shares of consumers that they might partly recognize according to the degree of information completeness. We analyze the impact of the amount of information on market configuration, profits and welfare. With high degrees of information completeness and sufficiently small asymmetries in the market shares, firms are more likely to use aggressive pricing strategies, both poaching rival's consumers. Otherwise, firms adopt different pricing strategies and price discrimination is enforced only by the smaller firm. Greater information completeness has a non-monotonic effect on profits and a decreasing effect on welfare. Finally, we show that the case with perfect information is a special case whose results do not hold when even a small degree of uncertainty is introduced in the game.

Data on websites that hosted job boards and CV banks in the U.S. from 2000 to 2011 reveal that websites imposed fewer restrictions (in terms of the duration of use) and lower fees for job searchers relative to employers. This asymmetry in the treatment (or the terms of use) changed as the relative scarcity of job searchers and job vacancies in the labor market in which the websites offered their services changed. Compared with job searchers, employers faced less stringent restrictions and lower fees when job searchers were scarce relative to job openings. These adjustments imply that the value of using an employment website changes with the number of potential users and the probability of finding a quality match. We find that these adjustments were most pronounced for websites that relied exclusively on employers and job searchers for their content (job ads and CVs). Whereas existing literature on the role that network size plays in intermediaries’ decision-making has focused on prices, our findings reveal that this focus can overlook other adjustments that affect the terms of use. Given that these adjustments in our context may result in longer periods during which CVs and job ads remain online, our findings suggest that the optimal design of intermediaries must include tools that help users sort through stale information.

This article studies the impact of algorithmic pricing on market competition when firms collect data to charge personalized prices to their past customers. Pricing algorithms offer to each firm a rich set of pricing strategies combining first and third-degree price discrimination: they can choose for each of their past customers whether to charge them personalized or homogeneous prices. The optimal targeting strategy of each firm consists in charging personalized prices to past customers with the highest willingness to pay and a homogeneous price to the remaining consumers, including past customers with a low valuation on whom a firm has information. This targeting strategy maximizes rent extraction while softening competition between firms compared to classical models where firms target all past customers. In turn, price-undercutting and poaching practices are not sustainable with behavior-based algorithmic pricing, resulting in greater industry profits.

We investigate patent litigation, settlements and R&D incentives on a market where two firms develop technologies in order to obtain patents and produce goods. Firms may sell IP rights to a Patent Assertion Entity (PAE) that acts as intermediary for patent monetization. We find that compared to simultaneous market entry, the effect of this so-called patent privateering is mitigated if firms enter sequentially. Furthermore, we show that privateering may decrease industry profits by distortion of R&D incentives even when there is no rent extraction by the PAE.

Two federal programs in the United States subsidize internet access for rural healthcare providers, namely, Healthcare Connect Fund (HCF) and the Telecom Program. HCF uses a subsidy mechanism that strongly incentivizes healthcare providers to shop for faster or cheaper internet. Telecom does not incentivize shopping. Theoretically, this predicts that HCF must achieve faster or cheaper internet than Telecom. I empirically test this question and find that Telecom subsidy recipients pay 132-179% more than HCF subsidy recipients on similar internet plans. Evidence point to Telecom's poor incentive design as the root cause. Eliminating this price gap would save American taxpayers $143 million annually. The findings highlight the power of program design, showcase the unintended consequences of misaligned incentives, and encourage policymakers to thoroughly examine program features, the impact on consumer behavior, and the effect on competition and market outcomes.

We study collusion sustainability in an infinitely repeated game in which firms might price discriminate, by offering personalized prices for the share of consumers they have information about. We do not impose any restrictions to the distribution of consumers and the product characteristic space. In such a general framework we show that when firms share their personal information about consumers, collusion is more difficult to sustain. We also show that, for intermediate levels of the discount factor, an antitrust policy aiming to discourage joint profit maximization and to maximize the consumer surplus should allow information sharing between firms. Instead, a ban on information sharing is optimal only if firms have imperfect information about their own consumers.

Technological development and better information systems potentially increase firms' abilities to use personalized pricing. Should firms take advantage of such an opportunity, or should they rather charge all consumers the same price (uniform pricing)? It might seem obvious that it is optimal for an individual firm to use personalized pricing; if it does, it can charge each consumer a price equal to her maximal willingness to pay. No other price plan can possibly yield higher profits. However, we show that if a firm is expected to use personalized pricing, then it effectively eliminates a rival's possibility to select values on non-price variables, such as horizontal differentiation, that can soften competition and increase profits for all firms. Once we take this into account, we might no longer expect that personalized pricing is a dominant strategy. Indeed, we show that it may be a dominant strategy for a firm to commit to uniform pricing prior to the rival's choice of non-price variables if it has the ability to do so.

We estimate the returns to online skills certification for engineering graduates in India using a regression discontinuity design. Individuals in our dataset take a computer programming exam, and are required to score above a threshold to receive a widely used software engineer IT-services certificate provided by an online job skills credentialing platform in India. We find that certified candidates have approximately 0.25 higher probability of finding employment following the exam. Our results indicate that skill certification in this context is a strong one-time signal of quality. Certification cannot replace education, however, and fails to predict longer-term job market outcomes as demonstrated by the lack of estimated causal impact on current employment status or income level. Our findings suggest the promise and limits of certification in an educational market where university training is highly variable.