Today is April Fools Day although it is hard to miss it on the Internet. As this is a blog devoted to the more dispassionate investigation of the digital economy, I thought it would be appropriate to write a little today about several pieces of research that have been conducted by economists in recent years …
Will free MOOCs destroy Higher Education?
MIT Strategy professor Michael Cusumano published a lengthy opinion piece where he argued that free online courses may have much higher costs and consequences than the socially minded people promoting them intended. I worry, however, based on the history of free products and services available on the Internet and their impact on the software products business …
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Will the Internet Destroy the News Media? Video
I gave a seminar earlier this month at the iSchool at Berkeley. It was on my research with Susan Athey and Emilio Calvano into the future of the news media. Being an iSchool, they placed the entire video (90 minutes) on YouTube.
Reselling eBooks doesn't pass the sniff test
There is renewed interest in the idea of being able to re-sell eBooks and other digital content. First, Amazon and Apple have both entered the patent fray with exchange ideas that allow electronic content to be traded in much the same way that they can be traded as physical content. Second, the US Supreme Court …
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Deconstructing Google's Trust Problem
Right after it announced the execution of Google Reader, Google released a new product -- really a service -- called Google Keep. It basically is an Evernote, note keeping app on the Google ecosystem. This prompted many bloggers including The Atlantic's James Fallows and Ezra Klein to announce their reluctance to invest in using products …
The social structure of news
With the looming loss of Google Reader, there has been a rethink of "what is it good for anyway?" Some felt that RSS has long been a poor medium for reading. They long for formatting that is consistent with the way an author intended. There have been some Google Reader alternatives that have provided that …
With Google Reader gone, is Google Scholar next?
Yesterday, Google announced its "spring cleaning" whereby it, usually, discards products most people had long thought discarded. Usually the products are Blackberry ones that don't really yield controversy. A few years back, Google retired Buzz which was generally regarded as a failure. Some product retirements are a little more troubling. Consider Google Wave as I wrote about in …
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Will Cory Doctorow buy an iPad now?
When the iPad first came out in 2010, Cory Doctorow said he would not buy one and advised others not to do so either. He had lots of reasons but for this post I want to address Reason No.1: Incumbents made bad revolutionaries Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. …
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 …
The Microsoft "Sequester"
Here is  a definition of "sequester" that isn't the real definition but what we now talk about. A sequester is a situation where a party (or parties) agree to a horribly painful and costly course of action to themselves in the event that they do not take a certain action. For the US Congress, the …
Digitopoly 