My last post challenged a New York Times op-ed’s view that the media industries should give up fighting piracy. Implicit in the Times editorial’s argument is the idea that piracy has little or no impact on media sales — a view shared by many in the tech community and seeming by some journalists as well. My colleague, …
Making the case for corporate venturing
Harvard's Josh Lerner has written a new book, The Architecture of Innovation. It is basically an up-to-date recount of what we know about how innovation is encouraged. It is heavily research based but extremely accessible and is a must read for anyone interested in the economics of innovation. The basic thesis of the books is: …
Anti-piracy regulation and competing with free
In a New York Times op-ed earlier this month, Nick Bilton used the metaphor of “Whac-A-Mole” to suggest that the creative industries are hopelessly naïve in their efforts to regulate online piracy. The editorial, “Internet Pirates Will Always Win”, argues that anti-piracy regulation is a lot like Whac-A-Mole: hitting one target only causes two or …
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Small facts can cause big changes to conclusions
Last week I attended the NBER's Economics of IT and Digitization conference at its Summer Institute. There were lots of interesting papers but I wanted to focus on one, in particular, that demonstrated how important seemingly small facts were for policy conclusions. This paper was by Jason Chan and Anindya Ghose and it explored the …
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Goin’ Cracker(s)
A few weeks ago NPR staffer Emily White blogged unapologetically that, like many members of generation, she had never paid for music. This prompted a firestorm of response and attention, including a few New York Times pieces ( here, here, and here). Musician David Lowery responded eloquently and forcefully, piquing my curiosity about him. It …
What does the average surfer know about Creative Commons?
What do you know about Creative Commons, the legal frameworks that support many web-based activities, such as Wikipedia, Flickr, or YouTube? You probably do not know too much, if you are like most people. Most users do not know the legal details behind the web – and that is a fact, as you will see …
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Workshop Announcement on Scholarly Communication and Open Science
Just a conference announcement related to the Sloan Foundation program I co-direct ... for those interested. NBER Workshop on Scholarly Communication, Open Science and Its Impact This workshop is part of a Sloan Foundation program co-directed by Joshua Gans and Fiona Murray. This year's workshop will focus on scholarly communication, its incentives and the effectiveness …
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Retractions and the function of a journal
With all of the discussion over the pricing of journals, one thing that has come up is their supposed decreasing importance. With online repositories of working papers, scholars and others no longer need access to the journals to get access to the research. To be sure, publication gives with it certification and that helps but …
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Berkeley Electronic Press Closes up Journals
I realize that this would be the second 'scholarly publication access' post of the day but as I was writing the other one I was directed to a paper by Mark McCabe and Chris Snyder (here is what used to be the link). It was a paper published in the BE Press journal Economic Analysis …
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Elsevier's economic case is lacking
The proposed US Research Works Act (RWA) proposes to prohibit government funding agencies, such as the NIH, from doing things like its open access policy (enacted in 2005) requiring all publications from funded research to be placed in National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central database within 12 months of publication. Not surprisingly, some publishers, notably for-profit publishers, are supporting the …
Digitopoly 