One of the themes in this week's blog discussion surrounding Paul Krugman's post on the subject was whether it is worth waiting around for peer review. As I’ve tried to explain, the notion of journals as gatekeepers was largely fictional even 25 years ago. And I have a somewhat jaundiced view of how the whole …
Blogs and academic research: A timely story
The other day, Paul Krugman wrote about the reduced relevance of formal academic publication given the nature of web distribution and discourse. It just so happens that today marks the completion of a personal story of mine that illustrates how blog discussion can lead to published academic research. However, it also demonstrates Krugman's main point …
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JSTOR tests changes
Following up on my post last week on academic publishing, JSTOR has announced that it will be testing changes that may open up access further. In the coming weeks, JSTOR will make available the beta version of a new program, Register & Read, which will give researchers read-only access to some journal articles, no payment required. …
A silver lining?
In today's New York Times (online), I have a short piece discussing the prospects for women in the current recession. Recessions are terrible for recent graduates and the evidence I have seen points to it being worse for women even taking into account moves to get further education. It's all somewhat gloomy. By coincidence, today …
Platforms and a visit to Japan
During the first week of December I visited Tokyo, Japan, and spoke about platforms. This was my first visit to Japan. Accordingly, this post mixes commentary with a bit of travelogue. Platforms are reconfigurable base of components on which participants build applications. Platforms have a long history in computing and electronics, with examples going back …
Are Digital Resale Markets Legal? Should They Be?
The other day I came across an article at Ars technica about ReDigi. You may have heard of ReDigi. They resell digital goods. Me, I was puzzled, so I emailed Ben Shiller, who has just finished his dissertation about resale digital markets. His dissertation is called “Digital Downloads and the Prohibition of Resale Markets for …
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Is the Sky Falling? The Quality of New Recorded Music since Napster
This essay first appeared at Vox EU on Nov 14, 2011. Since the appearance of Napster a dozen years ago, intellectual property rights have effectively been substantially weakened. Unfettered stealing has caused revenues to the recorded music industry to tumble by roughly a third. While this reversal has prompted academic chin-scratching over its cause, most …
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FTC Presentation
I'm presenting today at the Annual FTC Microeconomics workshop. Here is the agenda for that conference. You'll note the disproportionate representation by faculty members here at the Department of Strategic Management at Rotman. My topic is on "The Impact of the Internet on Advertising Markets for News Media" based on my work with Susan Athey …
Technological Plateau or Promise?
http://s.marketwatch.com/media/swf/main.swf Have we reached a technological plateau or is innovation still going strong? If you've read my book with Andy McAfee, you know where I stand. David Wessel of the WSJ discusses the pros and cons of the argument and ties it to our current economic woes in this five minute video.
Grant from the Sloan Foundation
Readers of this blog will recall that the Sloan Foundation's funding of the NBER Economics of Digitization program was the impetus to starting this blog. Erik and Shane are among the leaders of that program. I am happy to announce today that a program that I will co-direct with Fiona Murray (MIT) has just been …
Digitopoly 