It is the one year anniversary of the Open Internet Advisory Committee (as noted earlier). Today the committee issued a report of its work over the last year. You can access it here. Today’s post discusses the report about data Caps, which was written by the Economic Impacts working group. I am a member of …
The Open Internet Advisory Committee at one year
Today I would like to make a little shout-out for recent work at the FCC to improve policy making for the Internet. To do that I need to put my preferences front and center. There are policy debates, and then there is actual policy making. The former grabs headlines on occasion, while the latter rarely …
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Information Technology in the Desert
Every summer my wife and I take the children west to experience nature at its grandest. Though these trips are designed to foster “quality family time,” invariably they teach us about more about ourselves than merely about nature. In previous posts I have used these trips to learn something new about the role of information …
Differentiated Platforms
Differentiation is a standard concept for analyzing competition. It describes a common situation, where one firm develops the ability to serve one type of customer in a market—say, buyers who will pay a lot to save time—while a competing firm serves another—say, budget-conscious buyers who are patient. Differentiation can describe common competitive behavior in technology …
Revenge Editing and Wikipedia
Unless you regularly read Salon, you probably missed last week's interesting article about anextraordinary case of revenge editing on Wikipedia. This article should matter to anyone who cares about Wikipedia, and, more generally, it should matter to anyone who cares about the long run success of open platforms for accumulating content. Look, the world is …
Crowd-Sourcing and Crowd-Hunting and the Boston Marathon Bomb Brothers.
How did the Boston Marathon Bombing brothers get caught? The release of videos played a key role. This decision to release this video has been called many things – a risky decision, a calculated bet, a crucial turning point, and a fortunate use of crowd-sourcing. Let’s not get sloppy with the use of modern lingo. …
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The On Line Honesty Box
Many vendors give away free services, but usually there is a catch. For example, while Google has given away search services for more than a decade, no user has any illusions as to why. Advertising buys space and tries to reach readers. As another example, for many years US cellular carriers came close to giving …
Consumer Surplus in the Online Economy
The Economist sponsors a blog called Free exchange. This week Free exchange solicited posts to complement an article in the magazine that discusses challenges measuring the consumer surplus generated by the internet. They invited experts in the field to comment on the piece and on related research. I made a contribution explaining the challenges in …
A Legend in Economics Passes
By Professor Thomas N. Hubbard, Senior Associate Dean, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University Armen Alchian died yesterday. He was 98. Many economists of my generation did not know Armen personally. However, signs of his work are pervasive in the field. There are many good examples of this in the research and teaching of many …
Game Structure
For several years, commentators have forecast that the rise in smartphones and tablets, as well as Facebook, would upend the structure of the gaming market. A variety of novel adroit aliens and irascible animals symbolically represent the new order, while new companies from new genres alter the identities of suppliers. Methinks that all the talk …
