Information Economics and Policy最新文献

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.

Platforms often compete over non-price strategies such as the exclusive distribution of products. But these strategies are not always welfare-enhancing. Using rich data on audiovisuals distributed on platforms in Brazil, we find that non-exclusive distribution and availability of titles across platforms is more effective in deterring online piracy than in the single-homing case. Moreover, for the subset of domestic movies, it induces higher average investment in the quality of new titles upstream. We discuss options of copyright and competition policies in the light of these findings.

Millions of citizens and firms lack access to high speed internet, even though governments pledged to spend huge sums of money to subsidize internet networks. In this paper we review some systematic flaws of present policies and outline a promising alternative. We propose that governments should treat the broadband infrastructure as a public responsibility and set up public-private partnerships that deploy, fund, and temporarily operate the broadband in exchange for collecting service fees and, if necessary, subsidies. Least-present-value-of-revenue auctions can be used to award all concessions, not only those that are expected to require subsidies, and concessions should revert to public ownership and be re-auctioned if the promised present value of revenue has been reached through collection of service fees. This procurement method is easy to implement, efficient, and immune to strategic manipulations and renegotiations.

We study the competitive effects of a vertical merger in a digital industry where an integrated incumbent (closed ecosystem) competes with an open ecosystem formed by an upstream supplier (ecosystem gatekeeper) and two downstream retailers selling differentiated products. Absent innovation, the incumbent sells a superior product compared to the rivals’ ones. Yet, the gatekeeper of the open ecosystem can fill up this gap by engaging in product innovation. We investigate the impact of vertical integration on the gatekeeper’s incentives to foreclose its non-integrated downstream unit and innovate its ecosystem to compete head-to-head with the incumbent. The vertically integrated gatekeeper raises the costs of the unintegrated competitor to relax intra-ecosystem competition but does not fully foreclose it as that would cause fiercer inter-ecosystem competition. Moreover, vertical integration enhances innovation within the open ecosystem, enabling its participants to catch up with the incumbent. Overall, vertical integration may benefit consumers even when it softens intra-ecosystem competition.

India has risen to prominence as a global supplier of information technology (IT). However, the extent to which IT benefits Indian manufacturing is less well known. We assess the effects of IT capital on firm's growth from 1998 to 2016. We make two significant contributions: (i) we make comparisons between different periods, high-IT intensive and low-IT intensive sectors and 14 manufacturing industries at a disaggregated-level, (ii) to overcome the problems of simultaneity in production function estimation, we employ a recently developed semi-parametric technique. Our findings indicate that (i) IT as a production input contributes significantly to firm's output, yet the estimated effects vary significantly by time-period and industry, (ii) the impact of IT is maximum between 2000 and 2009, and then begins to weaken between 2010 and 2016, (iii) IT elasticities in high- and low-technology sectors appear to be converging, particularly between 2010 and 2016.

This paper investigates how privacy regulation affects the structure of online markets. We empirically analyse the effects of the 2009 ePrivacy Directive in Europe on firm revenues. Our results indicate that, if any, only large firms were weakly negatively affected by the implementation of the Directive. We also provide a simple theoretical model predicting an avenue how privacy regulation may predominantly influence the revenues and profits of larger firms, even if - as some of our evidence indicates - these larger firms may actually offer more privacy than smaller rivals. Our results suggest that while privacy regulation is not without costs to businesses, it need not distort competition to the favour of larger firms.

The development of online social media has raised concerns about how individuals are over-exposed to partisan news. However, social media are only a part of the daily media diet of an average consumer (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017; Allen et al., 2020). The aim of this paper is therefore to examine partisan news exposure with respect to the entire media diet. We develop a partisan selective exposure index that indicates the over-representation of partisan political opinions in individual daily news consumption. Our analysis of data from a survey of 4,000 people in France shows that on average, partisan exposure is low when social media are excluded. Our estimations also indicate that social media consumption increases selective exposure to partisan content. While the youngest and the less educated appear to be less exposed to partisan content in the absence of social media, our results suggest that this is no longer the case when social media are included in the news diet. Finally, we show that the more people declare extreme (right- or left-wing) political views, the more they are over-exposed to like-minded content.