Competition in the Digital Age
There is has been a bit of discussion this week regarding The Blockchain. This is the real innovation that powers Bitcoin but one that many see may be a way of generating trust and permissions. Here is a great summary in The Economist. This can be dry stuff -- you know, hard to motivate. But …
Continue reading "The Internet of Things, Dangers, Trust and the Blockchain"
Regular readers will know that I have been focussed on disruption as a phenomenon where successful firms fail precisely because they pursue the good strategies that made them successful in the first place. My forthcoming book deals exclusively with that issue. But there is a group of people -- mostly outside of academia -- who …
Continue reading "Traditional disruption theory and predictions"
My latest book, The Disruption Dilemma, is now available for pre-order on Amazon (hard-cover only). It will be published by MIT Press in March 2016 and there will be an electronic version available by then. The book arose out of a blog post I wrote last year but also as part of a desire to …
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Last year Steve Levy wrote "The Definitive Story of Information Wants to be Free." It is an interesting reflection on that phrase and its origins. The exact quote arose in a conversation between Stewart Brand and Steve Wosniak at the first hackers conference in 1984 and was recorded by Levy as this: On the one hand …
Continue reading ""Information Wants to be Free": The history of that quote"
In Slate, Eli Dourado has a post in support of Comcast's move to cap broadband usage at 300GB per month unless you want to pay $10 for a little more or $30 for unlimited. I have played the rational economist explains to consumers why a restriction is good for them card more times than I …
Continue reading "Broadband usage caps are probably inefficient"
While I wouldn't want this to be a general statement: platform-owned apps can be really terrible. Why? Because they don't permit level-playing field competition between their own apps and third party apps on their platform. And that lack of competition is costly; maybe even for the platforms themselves. Consider a first example: iTunes. iTunes is …
25 years ago this month Paul Romer's paper, "Endogenous Technological Change" was published in the Journal of Political Economy. After over 20,000 citations, it is one of the most influential economics papers of that period. The short version of what that paper did was to provide a fully specified model whereby technological change (i.e., the …
MIT Assistant Professor in Economics, Heidi Williams, yes, you read that right, Assistant, was just award a Macarthur Genius grant. Here is the official citation. And here is the short form: Heidi Williams, 34, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose “insights about market inducements for innovation and the implications of technological change …
In light of the recent debate on ad-blocking, the AEA has decided to highlight my research with Simon Anderson on the topic on their website. It is a really good summary including an interactive graphic of our main result.
Last week, the Sloan Management Review published a study by Andy King and Baljir Baatartogtokh that re-examined the success record of Clay Christensen's theory of disruption. They took 77 claims/predictions of disruption and asked experts to evaluate whether what happened to those companies was consistent with the theory of disruptive innovation. They found scant support. …
Digitopoly 