Information Economics and Policy最新文献

We utilize stated preference data from discrete choice exercises administered to 15,000 households and individuals in Mexico and estimate logit and conditional logit models to identify determinants of fixed and mobile broadband demand. We find that the service attribute most consistently important for broadband demand, apart from price, was service reliability and find that urban customers are willing to pay more for reliable fixed broadband service, but rural customers are willing to pay more for reliable mobile broadband service. We find evidence that rural customers are more price sensitive compared to urban customers for mobile broadband but not for fixed broadband. We find evidence that fixed and mobile broadband services are complements and that speaking an indigenous language results in a higher likelihood of subscription for both fixed and mobile broadband as does greater daily internet usage. We do not find evidence that equipment subsidies are associated with greater likelihood of subscription.

Digital platform markets perform a myriad of daily transactions, providing internet-mediated exchange possibilities: between consumers, for peer-to-peer exchanges; between businesses, for digital value chains; and between businesses and consumers, in digital marketplaces. It is essential for competition that new entrants are able to join platform markets. However, these markets are often characterised by proprietary innovations, especially in data analytics applied to existing user data. The algorithmic analysis of user data and information might increase incumbency advantages, creating lock-in effects among users and making them more reluctant to join an entrant platform. The individual costs of these lock-in effects may differ between the sides of a platform, e.g., between sellers and buyers, and across users within each side, e.g., between sellers with different costs and/or propensities to join an entrant platform. Moreover, these costs will interact with cross-group network effects, another well-studied source of incumbency advantage. This paper develops a model exploring how different levels of lock-in effects may favour an incumbent platform. The conditions for platforms’ coexistence, to avoid market tipping, require lock-in effects to be "stronger" than cross-group effects. However, this condition also provides a market advantage to the incumbent platform compared to the entrant's. Therefore, policies aimed at reducing lock-in effects, such as mandating data portability, may counterintuitively impair entry conditions as the incumbent sets its prices more aggressively with lower lock-in effects.

The economics literature views R&D as an important conduit for growth because it generates new ideas that can be translated into technological innovations. Some of this R&D occurs in universities, making academic freedom an important part of this process. This literature ignores the potential role that academic research in the social sciences plays toward achieving non-commercial societal outcomes. We bridge this gap by proposing that academia generates social R&D. We posit that greater degrees of academic freedom allow for social R&D to flourish and be transformed into policies that improve societal conditions. We test our hypothesis by studying the relationship between academic freedom and inequality using panel data of 132 countries over the 1967–2018 period. We measure academic freedom using an index developed by the V-Dem Institute. Our econometric analysis suggests that an increase in the index is associated with a decrease in inequality. We employ instrumental variable and interactive fixed effects techniques to try to lend support to the causal relationship between academic freedom and inequality. We argue that this negative relationship can be explained by academia, predominantly the social sciences, exerting pressure on governments to enact policies that redistribute wealth. We find evidence in support of this mechanism using data from other sources.

This paper analyzes how customers’ heterogeneous search and switching habits affect the prices paid for telecommunication services in a context in which operators use price discrimination strategies to retain their customers and attract those of their rivals. Drawing on a representative sample of Spanish households (N=3,113), we show that engaged consumers pay 9.4% less than completely unengaged consumers for their telecommunication services, after controlling for the characteristics of the bundle of services contracted. We also find that highly engaged consumers (i.e. those that have called their operator to obtain a better deal and who have switched to a different operator at least once) pay 13.6% less for their services than unengaged consumers, that consumers who have switched operator at least once pay 8.4% less, and that consumers who call their operator to request better conditions for their contracts pay 5.8% less. Finally, we show that the excess price paid by unengaged consumers increases as they contract more sophisticated services, such as premium television content and additional mobile lines.

In this article we study the impact of taxation in the performance of the telecommunications sector. To do so, we develop a model that considers the taxes and fees imposed directly or indirectly along the telecommunications value chain. Overall, we find strong evidence of a negative impact on investment from an increase in regulatory fees, profit taxes, and excise taxes. In addition, telecommunication service prices are affected by the fiscal regime, both directly -through taxation over services- and indirectly, through obligations imposed on operators that can ultimately have an impact on service prices. We also find some evidence of the effect of custom duties for equipment and smartphones on the decrease of investment on broadband network deployment and service adoption, respectively. On this basis, we simulate a fiscal-reform scenario, consisting in removing sector-specific contributions to eliminate inter-sectoral asymmetries, with results suggesting significant gains in investment, coverage, and adoption. Considering these findings, and the potential socioeconomic gains from increasing broadband adoption, we believe that governments pursuing the development of digital agendas should consider potential fiscal reforms to accelerate the development of the digital economy. That being said, considering the potential loses in tax collection, a careful trade-off analysis should be performed before determining the nature and the scope of the fiscal reforms to be introduced.

Gautier and Somogyi (2020) showed that the monopolistic Internet service provider (ISP) can extract more surplus from consumers by giving priority to the weaker content to restore symmetry between content providers (CPs). In this study, we reexamine the issue and argue that their result depends critically on the shape of the delay cost function. We first show that under a linear delay cost, if the delay cost of contents from each CP increases with its own traffic amount, the opposite is true, that is, the ISP prefers to give priority to a strong CP, whereas it prefers to give priority to a weak CP if the delay cost of contents from an unprioritized CP decreases with its traffic amount. We confirm our insight in two specific models; the M/M/1 queuing model and the bandwidth subdivision model. We also discuss some implications of the ISP’s prioritization choice for social welfare.

This study examines the effect of internet job search (IJS) on job-finding rates among unemployed job seekers during the rapid expansion of the internet from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s. To address endogenous selection into IJS, I use an instrumental variables (IV) strategy exploiting the rise of IJS within occupations over time, which varied across occupations depending on pre-internet exposure to computers at work. The analysis sample includes unemployed workers from the December 1998, August 2000, September 2001, October 2003, and July 2011 Current Population Survey (CPS) Computer and Internet Use Supplements and the September 1992 Basic Monthly CPS, longitudinally matched with their employment outcomes from the subsequent monthly CPS files. The IV estimates indicate that IJS increased the 15-month job-finding rate by 12.9 percentage points (25.1% relative to the mean). Results from placebo exercises and various specification checks support a causal interpretation of the estimated effects. Additionally, the effectiveness of IJS remained stable over time throughout the analysis period.

Facebook has been criticized for exposing its users to low-quality and harmful information, including fake news, hate speech, and politically one-sided content. In December 2013 and again in August 2014, the platform updated its news feed algorithm to increase user exposure to quality content of news publishers, while curbing the proliferation of non-informative posts. This paper uses a sample of German newspapers to investigate the conjecture that these modifications raised the incentives to publish quality news stories on the platform, focusing on the number and diversity of news story posts about substantive political issues. Using the newspapers’ print editions as a counterfactual, our results indicate an increase in the amount of substantive political news on Facebook by approximately 30%. This expansion occurred in a politically balanced way, except that the outlets disproportionately increased their Facebook coverage of the formerly underrepresented Linke (Left Party). Consequently, the within-outlet concentration of political viewpoints decreased by about one half of the standard deviation of our concentration indices.

We use traffic data from around 5,000 web domains in Europe and United States to investigate the effect of the European Unions General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on website visits and user engagement. We document an overall traffic reduction of approximately 15% in the long-run and find a measurable reduction in engagement with websites. Traffic from both paid and unpaid channels dropped significantly. We observe an inverted U-shaped relationship between website size and change in visits due to privacy regulation: the smallest and largest websites lost visitors, while medium-sized ones were less affected. Enforcement matters as well: The effects were amplified considerably in the long-run, following the first significant fine issued eight months after the entry into force of the GDPR. Exploring potential mechanisms, both a reduction in advertising effectiveness and a higher user awareness of privacy issues can explain our results.

This study presents investigation of the effects of vertical integration between an internet service provider (ISP) and a content provider (CP) on the ISP’s zero-rating choice and social welfare. We develop a simple model in which a monopolistic ISP delivers content from two CPs to a representative consumer. The ISP can offer zero-rating contracts to one or two CPs, thereby allowing the consumer to use zero-rated content without consuming monthly data usage. We investigate how integration between the ISP and a CP affects the ISP’s zero-rating choice and social welfare. Our findings are the following. First, the vertically integrated ISP might zero-rate the unaffiliated CP exclusively when the CPs’ profitability is not so low. Second, the integration increases the total surplus and the independent CP’s profit. Our results indicate that vertical integration is welfare enhancing and beneficial to the independent CP.