Information Markets and Nonmarkets

As large amounts of data become available and can be communicated more easily and processed more e¤ectively, information has come to play a central role for economic activity and welfare in our age. This essay overviews contributions to the industrial organization of information markets and nonmarkets, while attempting to maintain a balance between foundational frameworks and more recent developments. We start by reviewing mechanism-design approaches to modeling the trade of information. We then cover ratings, predictions, and recommender systems. We turn to forecasting contests, prediction markets, and other institutions designed for collecting and aggregating information from decentralized participants. Finally, we discuss science as a prototypical information nonmarket with participants who interact in a non-anonymous way to produce and disseminate information. We aim to make the reader familiar with the central notions and insights in this burgeoning literature and also point to some open critical questions that future research will have to address

Fee-Setting Mechanisms: On Optimal Pricing by Intermediaries and Indirect Taxation

Mechanisms according to which private intermediaries or governments charge transaction fees or indirect taxes are prevalent in practice. We consider a setup with multiple buyers and sellers and two-sided independent private information about valuations. We show that any weighted average of revenue and social welfare can be maximized through appropriately chosen transaction fees and that in increasingly thin markets such optimal fees converge to linear fees. Moreover, fees decrease with competition (or the weight on welfare) and the elasticity of supply but decrease with the elasticity of demand. Our theoretical predictions fit empirical observations in several industries with intermediaries

Information choice: cost over content

When supplying information, agents choose between options that differ both in their contents and in their costs. We establish a “cost-over-content” theorem for a large class of dynamic trading environments where buyers choose from arbitrary sets of processes (experiments) that reveal information to the seller. When all experiments are equally costly, choosing any given experiment is a perfect equilibrium. However, when experiments differ in costs, there is a unique equilibrium: all buyers choose the cheapest experiment, regardless of the information it pro- vides. We explore implications for market performance, privacy, data sale, and defaults in market regulation

Consumer Co-creation of Digital Culture Products: Business Threat or New Opportunity?

New forms of implicit consumer collaborations in online communities and social networks influence demand preferences as consumers themselves increasingly participate in creating cultural products that both complements and competes with firm offerings. Although research findings on these issues vary, strong evidence from both theoretical and empirical work suggests that the increased technology affordance on the consumer side challenges the profitability of conventional producer strategies that are based on pushing product designs that serve large segments of consumers while ignoring the service of more nuanced consumer preferences. In this study, we present a market design in which producers create and sell original digital culture product and, examine the effect of consumer co-creation in the presence of consumer sharing (piracy) on market performance in terms of consumer and producer surplus and consumer choice. Using the methods of experimental economics, we find strong interaction effects between consumer sharing and co-creation, and, more specifically, we find that consumer sharing interacts with consumer-based co-creation and increases product variety and consumer surplus while reducing producer benefits from co-creation

Fee-Setting Mechanisms: On Optimal Pricing by Intermediaries and Indirect Taxation

Mechanisms according to which private intermediaries or governments charge transaction fees or indirect taxes are prevalent in practice. We consider a setup with multiple buyers and sellers and two-sided independent private information about valuations. We show that any weighted average of revenue and social welfare can be maximized through appropriately chosen transaction fees and that in increasingly thin markets such optimal fees converge to linear fees. Moreover, fees decrease with competition (or the weight on welfare) and the elasticity of supply but decrease with the elasticity of demand. Our theoretical predictions fit empirical observations in several industries with intermediaries

Digital piracy : theory

This article reviews recent theoretical contributions on digital piracy. It starts by elaborating on the reasons for intellectual property protection, by reporting a few facts about copyright protection, and by examining reasons to become a digital pirate. Next, it provides an exploration of the consequences of digital piracy, using a base model and several extensions (with consumer sampling, network effects, and indirect appropriation). A closer look at market-structure implications of end-user piracy is then taken. After a brief review of commercial piracy, additional legal and private responses to end-user piracy are considered. Finally, a quick look at emerging new business models is taken.information good, piracy, copyright, IP protection, internet, peer-to-peer, software, music