Information Economics and Policy最新文献

This paper studies front-page choices made by editors of major US newspapers. I document that newspaper front pages are biased to certain combinations of news after controlling for the newspaper bias and the overall market coverage of such news. I also provide a reader-maximization model for front-page decisions that I use to interpret the empirical biases as preferences of the newspaper population of target readers. Through the lens of my model, my estimates recover maps of complementarities among pairs of topics for each newspaper and I find that these contribute to the probability that news on a topic appears on the front page.

Clean production and digitalization are the main directions of global manufacturing development under the new industrial revolution. Based on the application of digital technologies in enterprises caused by the smart city construction in China, this study adopts the difference-in-difference method to investigate the impact of digitalization and environmental regulation on total factor productivity. Using panel data on Chinese manufacturing listed enterprises from 2008 to 2019, this study finds that digitalization and environmental regulation can significantly improve the total factor productivity. It also shows that digitalization improves the total factor productivity of manufacturing enterprises by reducing transaction costs, facilitating servitization, and stimulating innovation investment. In addition, environmental regulation can force manufacturing enterprises to transform and improve their total factor productivity. However, the interaction between environmental regulation and digitalization has a significant negative impact on total factor productivity, implying that the paths of clean transformation and digitalization transformation is not coordinated. Our findings have implications for enacting effective policies to help manufacturing enterprises achieve digital transformation and clean production.

This paper analyzes behavior-based price discrimination (BBPD) in an asymmetric duopoly with switching costs and including both vertical and horizontal differentiation. We demonstrate that there are two configurations of market share in equilibrium. In the first configuration, where both firms poach their rival’s consumers, the equilibria arise when switching costs are low and the firms are relatively symmetric. In the second configuration, where only the firm with more supporting services poaches the rival’s consumers, the resulting equilibria reverse. We reveal the impact of switching costs on firm profits under BBPD as well as under uniform pricing and show that with either high switching costs or sufficiently large firm asymmetries, BBPD may benefit both firms. Moreover, we find that in the second market configuration, social welfare can be higher with BBPD than with uniform pricing under high switching costs and large firm asymmetries. We also reach the same conclusion regarding social welfare when consumers are myopic in the first market configuration.

Proponents of Net Neutrality rules argue that these regulations prevent internet service providers (ISP) from slowing down content that competes with some of their own services (vertical foreclosure). To study these incentives, we measure consumers’ willingness to pay for speed on the video on-demand market. We use a survey experiment to estimate a differentiated-product demand system for choosing how to view specific content. We establish a necessary condition for ISPs to have an incentive for vertical foreclosure: consumers respond to reduced speeds by substituting to a service offered by the ISP. We also show that by eliminating vertical foreclosure, Net Neutrality could provide incentives for ISPs to compete on prices.

In the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), people have been requested to work from home with information and communication technology (ICT) tools, i.e. telework. This paper investigates which factors (infection of COVID-19, individual characteristics, task characteristics, and working environments) are associated with telework use in Japan. Using the unique panel survey on telework, our estimation finds that although telework use remains low in Japan, educated, high ICT-skilled, younger, and female workers who engage in less teamwork and less routine tasks tend to use telework. Working environments such as the richness of IT communication tools, digitalized offices, and flexible-hour working systems are all positively correlated with telework use.

This study analyzes the effect of local Internet speed infrastructure (backhaul) on educational outcomes. In 2008, the Brazilian government implemented an Internet expansion policy that brought broadband to more than 3000 municipalities. The policy was designed with implementation criteria that make it a natural experiment that can be investigated through a regression discontinuity design (RDD). The results suggest worsening proficiency, higher dropout and retention among students from municipalities served by more powerful backhauls, i.e., capable of supporting higher connection speeds over fiberoptic lines. These results are paralleled in the empirical literature, which predominantly indicates negative or neutral effects of Internet access on education. This study demonstrates the need for a deeper reflection on the domestic use of the Internet and its consequences on educational outcomes of school-age children and adolescents.

Administrative and regulatory burden reduction is critical to improving government efficiency and economic competitiveness. Innovations in government through Information and Communication Technologies are key tools in designing policies to achieve these goals. Using a panel dataset covering 169 countries from 2004 to 2018, we investigate the possible contribution of digital government as a business facilitator. The empirical results suggest that progress in digital government contributes to reducing administrative and regulatory burdens, creating a more business-friendly environment in several areas of business regulations. Governance effectiveness may also play a significant role in facilitating business. The results are robust to a battery of robustness tests and alternative empirical strategies.

This paper studies third-degree price discrimination in a classical model of price competition with differentiated products. Firms charge different prices to different consumers, based on their estimate of their price sensitivity. If the market is fully covered and information is symmetric, more accurate information has a pure redistributive effect, leading to higher profits but lower consumer welfare. If the market is not covered, information always benefit firms but the welfare effects are ambiguous. If information is asymmetric, firms benefit from more information, but less so than in the symmetric case, and total welfare depends on the extent of this asymmetry. I conclude that firms have strong incentives to share information about consumer tastes.

Social media open up new possibilities for firms to exploit information from various external sources. Does this information help firms to become more innovative? Combining firm-level survey data with information from firms’ Facebook pages, we study the role that firms’ and users’ activities on Facebook play in the innovation process. We find that firms’ adoption of a Facebook page as well as feedback from users are positively and significantly related to product innovations. Our results withstand a large set of robustness checks, including estimations that take potential endogeneity of firms’ Facebook use as well as unobserved heterogeneity into account. Analyzing the content of firm posts and user comments reveals that Facebook adoption is only correlated with product innovations if firms and users actively participate in a discussion, especially when engagement is above-average and comes from both sides.

In this paper, we study the optimal design of incentives to induce a digital platform to limit the extraction of data from users, whose privacy loss is further aggravated by their naive use of the platform. We show that caps on the amount of data collected can induce the optimal data-saving effort by the platform. If the platform’s effort is not observable, a menu of data caps should be provided and it entails a higher (lower) loss of privacy for less (more) naive users, relative to the first best. We also show that compensating users for their data can efficiently incentivize effort, but might increase the privacy loss of more naive users.