Information Economics and Policy最新文献

We examine the impact of removing Digital Rights Management (DRM) from electronic book devices. We derive a Bayesian hierarchical logit model based on the consumer’s utility maximization problem and estimate the model using data from a choice-based survey. We then simulate the counterfactual market outcomes when DRM is removed; on average, the consumer surplus increases nontrivially holding everything else constant. However, the gain in consumer surplus is diminished when we re-calibrate e-book device prices. Further, if there is a negative shock to content supply, then the consumer surplus could in fact decrease after DRM removal.

Using unique data from a systematic roll-out of broadband infrastructure in rural areas, we provide evidence on the impact of high-speed internet via broadband on three main sectors of economy: retail, agriculture, and manufacturing. Our instrumental variable model, which relies upon the timing of the roll-out at the first stage, shows that in general broadband access does not foster economic growth, but positively affects the retail sector, with no effect on the manufacturing and agricultural sectors. We also find that the biggest effects are found for speeds below 10 Mbps. We supplement our findings by exploring potential mechanisms that could drive the results.

This paper develops a model of investigative journalism and media capture in the market for news with the depreciation of the value of news over time and a limited exclusive supply period of original news due to copying by other media outlets. We make distinctions between traditional media outlets that engage in investigative journalism and fringe digital media that mainly copy and spread original news created elsewhere. We show that the quantity and quality of news with investigative journalism decrease and media capture is more likely as digital technologies induce a lower fixed cost of entry for the fringe firms and a shorter exclusive supply period of news. These results may explain why there is scant evidence for the conventional view that more media outlets lead to higher quality news and less political capture, despite proliferation of news and information outlets in the digital age.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is often thought of as a uniformly positive tool making governments more transparent, accountable, and less corrupt. However, the evidence on it is mixed and often misunderstood. Hence, this article carries out a systematic stocktaking of ICT tools’ impact on corruption, offering a nuanced and context-dependent assessment. The tools reviewed are digital public services, crowdsourcing platforms, whistleblowing tools, transparency portals, distributed ledger technology, and artificial intelligence. We scrutinise the evidence both on ICTs’ anticorruption effectiveness and misuse for corruption. Drawing on the commonalities across technologies, we find that ICT can support anti-corruption by impacting public scrutiny in numerous ways: enabling reporting on corruption, promoting transparency and accountability, facilitating citizen participation and government-citizen interactions. However, ICT can also provide new corruption opportunities through the dark web, cryptocurrencies, or the misuse of technologies such as centralised databases. The introduction of ICT tools does not automatically translate into anti-corruption outcomes; rather, impact hinges on the matching between ICT tools and the local context, including support for and skills in using technology.

There are large variations in research output among nations despite the rapid globalization progress. This article provides a new angle to help explain such variations. In this article, we study the impact of internet penetration on the research output of an economy. Using a country-level panel dataset, we find that higher internet penetration increases the volume of research output in an economy. The results are robust to a number of specifications, including an instrumental variable approach that addresses the endogeneity of internet penetration. We also find some evidence showing that the impact of internet penetration on research output quantity decreases as the size of fixed broadband users increase in an economy. The effects of internet access on research quality is less conclusive. Results suggest that broadening the access of internet is important for research output boosting or innovation in general.

Whether or not the option to work remotely increases firm labour productivity is theoretically ambiguous. We use a rich and representative sample of Portuguese firms, and within-firm variation in the policy of remote electronic access – a key prerequisite for remote work – over the period 2011–2016, to empirically assess the relationship between remote access and firm labour productivity. Based on estimations of models with firm-fixed effects, we find a significantly negative association, on average, between remote access and productivity. However, we also find a substantial degree of heterogeneity across different categories of firms, where the association between remote access and productivity is significantly positive for firms that undertake R&D activities. Our findings suggest that the possibility of working remotely, as proxied by the possibility of remote access, is more likely to be harmful for productivity in non-exporting, small firms that do not do R&D, and that employ a workforce with a below-average skill level.

We analyse an oligopoly model where mobile operators may charge subscribers for placing and receiving calls. We compare the CPP equilibrium (where receiving calls is free) with the RPP equilibrium (where placing and receiving calls are priced equally). Reducing termination rates leads to lower prices and higher penetration under CPP, but has reversed effects under RPP. No termination rate yields efficiency under either retail regime. Comparing EU practice (CPP with termination regulated at cost) and US practice (RPP with Bill and Keep), we find that total surplus is higher in the US when the value of receiving calls is very high, but both producer and consumer surplus are higher in the EU for intermediate values of the call externality. If call externality is higher (resp., lower), consumers (resp., producers) are better off in the US.

We present a new measure for the political position of news outlets based on politicians’ selective sharing of news items. Politicians predominantly share news items that are in line with their political position, hence, one can infer the political position of news outlets from the politicians’ revealed preferences over news items. We apply our measure to twelve major German media outlets by analyzing tweets of German Members of Parliament (MPs) on Twitter. For each news outlet under consideration, we compute the correlation between the political position of the seven parties in the 19th German Bundestag and their MPs’ relative number of Twitter referrals to that outlet. We find that three outlets are positioned on the left, and two of them are positioned on the right. Several robustness checks support our results. We also apply our procedure to nine major media outlets from the USA and find that two outlets are positioned on the right, five are positioned on the left of the political spectrum.

The number of active users of digital maps and navigation applications has exceeded a billion worldwide. As these apps are predominantly free of charge, their contribution to consumer well-being cannot be measured using common economic indicators, like GDP. The present study measures, in an economically consistent way, consumer surplus from a navigation service. The preferences for the navigation service and two optional location-based functionalities: traffic information and commercial information are elicited in a discrete choice experiment. In the experiment, respondents are confronted with a range of location-sharing arrangements set by a navigation provider of varying intrusiveness regarding privacy. Median consumer surplus from using satellite-only navigation without location-based functionalities is estimated at EUR 8.06 per month. Adding location-based services increases this gain by 36% to EUR 10.98, provided that data sharing is arranged on non-intrusive, user-centric terms. Both location-sharing conditions set by providers and privacy concerns of users affect the surplus size gained from using free navigation applications.

Caused largely by the recent technological changes towards digitalization, infrastructure investment in network industries has become the main issue for regulatory intervention. In this paper, we study the impact of co-investment between an incumbent and an entrant on the roll-out of network infrastructures under demand uncertainty. We show that if the entrant can wait to co-invest until demand is realized, the incumbent’s investment incentives are reduced, and total coverage can be lower than in a benchmark with earlier co-investment. We consider two remedies to correct these distortions: (i) co-investment options purchased ex ante by the entrant from the incumbent, and (ii) risk premia paid ex post by the entrant. We show that co-investment options cannot fully reestablish total coverage, while premia can do so in most cases, though at the cost of less entry. Finally, we show that an appropriate combination of ex-ante and ex-post remedies can improve welfare.