Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Catherine Tucker, and I recently hosted the third NBER Conference in the Economics of Artificial Intelligence in Toronto. The conference provides a place for scholars from different fields of economics to discuss the implications of the rise of AI. The fields this year included macro, labor, theory, development, mechanism design, econometrics, …
Is privacy an antitrust problem?
Privacy has just recently entered antitrust discussions. The debate has focused on whether concerns about privacy should be used as a criterion to regulate large firms that look like monopolies. The question which US Senator Al Franken raises is whether a reduction in consumer harm due to privacy erosion should be treated in a similar …
Google changes how it uses your data
Thursday morning, millions of Google users received an email about a change in the company’s privacy policy. Google does not seem to be collecting more information as a company. Instead the new policy makes it clear that Google, Google+, Gmail, and YouTube are owned by the same company, and providing data to one Google property …
Digitopoly 