Too Expensive to Meter: The influence of transaction costs in transportation and communication

Technology appears to be making fine-scale charging (as in tolls on roads that depend on time of day or even on current and anticipated levels of congestion) increasingly feasible. And such charging appears to be increasingly desirable, as traffic on roads continues to grow, and costs and public opposition limit new construction. Similar incentives towards fine-scale charging also appear to be operating in communications and other areas, such as electricity usage. Standard economic theory supports such measures, and technology is being developed and deployed to implement them. But their spread is not very rapid, and prospects for the future are uncertain. This paper presents a collection of sketches, some from ancient history, some from current developments, that illustrate the costs that charging imposes. Some of those costs are explicit (in terms of the monetary costs to users, and the costs of implementing the charging mechanisms). Others are implicit, such as the time or the mental processing costs of users. These argue that the case for fine-scale charging is not unambiguous, and that in many cases may be inappropriate.transportation, communication, transaction costs, collection costs

A Survey on Trust and Privacy Negotiability in the Norwegian Mobile Telecom Market

AbstractWe investigate, by method of statistical survey, people's attitudes toward privacy, trust and personal information sharing in the context of price discrimination effects in the mobile telecom market, by asking a selection of 546 individuals, a sample size that is sufficient to be representative for the Norwegian mobile market of consumers. Common wisdom tells that people value their privacy, but not much facts have been collected about how much people value privacy, say, as consumers of specific services in the mobile market. Moreover, it is reasonable to expect that individuals will differ in their negotiability of personal information vs price of service. In this study, we measure a strong privacy negotiability correlated to age and income, thus confirming common intuition about this. We find that technically assuring anonymity of service will significantly affect and facilitate the user's willingness to release personal information to the service provider, in particular with respect to information about specific buying preferences and frequent travel destinations. Somewhat surprising, a practice of targeted advertisement in exchange for lower mobile service price is acceptable to about half the population

Economic Policy Analysis and the Internet: Coming to Terms with a Telecommunications Anomaly

The significant set of public policy issues for economic analysis that arise from the tensions between the ‘special benefits’ of the Internet as a platform for innovation, and the drawbacks of the “anomalous” features of the Internet viewed as simply one among the array of telecommunications systems, is the focus of discussion in this chapter. Economists concerned with industrial organization and regulation (including antitrust and merger law) initially found new scope for application of their expertise in conventional policy analyses of the Internet’s interactions with other segments of the telecommunications sector (broadcast and cable television, radio and telephone), and emphasized the potential congestion problems posed by user anonymity and flat rate pricing. Policy issues of a more dynamic kind have subsequently come to the fore. These involve classic tradeoffs between greater efficiency and producer and consumer surpluses today, and a potential for more innovation in Web-based products and service in the future. Many such tradeoffs involve choices such as that between policies that would preserve the original ‘end-to-end’ design of the original Internet architecture, and those that would be more encouraging of market-driven deployment of new technologies that afforded ISPs with greater market power the opportunity to offer (and extract greater profits from) restricted-Web services that consumers valued highly, such as secure and private VOIP.public policy, telecommunications, Web-based products, user anonymity

PRICE TRANSPARENCY ISSUES AND TREATING CUSTOMER FAIRLY BY E-COMMERCE FIRMS IN INDIA

The Indian E-commerce industry is growing rapidly due to outbreak of pandemic, rapid increase in use of smartphones and access to high speed internet have resulted in customers looking for convenience by making online purchase thereby saving time and cost. Technology plays an inevitable role in helping ecommerce firms maximize their profit by analyzing customer behavior online, making recommendations and providing personalized pricing. This paper will focus of understanding and analyzing the present scenario in the online retail space to explore the following concerns which is a point of discussion in this field. Are customers really being treated fairly by ecommerce firms? Are customers guided to make purchase through recommendation engines and personalized pricing and end up paying more as firms are able to identify their willingness to pay more? This provides a qualitative study to answer these questions

Is Australia Really the Lucky Country? Price Discrimination in Digital Distribution

Digital content services have become a major source of information and entertainment for people, and the Internet has provided a means by which businesses and consumers can easily and efficiently distribute it. A large amount of this content is copyrighted or tied to a service, and sold commercially through multiple electronic and physical distribution channels. The modern day ‘gamer’ is expected to have a broadband connection and be able to access various digital distribution platforms to acquire such content. Due to price information dispersion and web resources dedicated to consumer awareness, differential pricing of PC game digital content delivery has recently become a controversial topic. This study collected and analysed price data across six geographical regions for over 1000 software titles in order to determine whether there was regional price discrimination. The results showed strong support for the price discrimination proposition. Future studies will focus on the causes and effects of such pricing and how pricing strategies can better manage the relationship between consumer and publisher

Can you own your personal data? The HAT (Hub-Of-All-Things) data ownership model

This paper sets out 11 principles of the HAT data ownership model as the basis for the legal, economic and technical engineering of personal data rights for individuals, sui generis, through the HAT Microserver artefact and re-commodification of personal data into a new asset class of PPD (person-controlled personal data) for a market to emerge. We argue that the formation of PPD as an asset class can emerge a primary market for personal data due to its ability to create differential privacy through selected data (without revealing personal identifying information), bundled multi-source data from the individuals themselves that is verifiable, data that is shareable in real time and on demand from the cloud and that is dynamically accurate, due to individuals themselves being the stakeholders of their data. The HAT Project’s ultimate objective is that an explicit, primary market for personal data, similar to the emergence of a primary market for digital music in the early 2000s, would reduce illegal and inefficient personal data markets as well as reduce externalities relating to privacy, as future applications switch to using HATs as user accounts. The HAT model sets up a parallel asset class to challenge the OPD asset class through easier access, higher quality and lower friction, much like the way music licensees challenged music piracy

Individual Tariffs for Mobile Communication Services

This paper introduces a conceptual framework and a computational model for individual tariffs for mobile communication services. The purpose is to provide guidance for implementation by communication service suppliers or user groups alike. The paper first examines the sociological and economic incentives for personalized services and individual tariffs. Then it introduces a framework for individual tariffs which is centered on user and supplier behaviours. The user, instead of being fully rational, has "bounded rationality" and his behaviours are subject to economic constraints and influenced by social needs. The supplier can belong to different types of entities such as firms and communities; each has his own goals which lead to different behaviors. Individual tariffs are decided through interactions between the user and the supplier and can be analyzed in a structured way using game theory. A numerical case in mobile music training is developed to illustrate the concepts.risks;mobile communication services;Individual tariffs;computational games

Agent-based modeling of a price information trading business

We describe an agent-based simulation of a fictional (but feasible) information trading business. The Gas Price Information Trader (GPIT) buys information about real-time gas prices in a metropolitan area from drivers and resells the information to drivers who need to refuel their vehicles. Our simulation uses real world geographic data, lifestyle-dependent driving patterns and vehicle models to create an agent-based model of the drivers. We use real world statistics of gas price fluctuation to create scenarios of temporal and spatial distribution of gas prices. The price of the information is determined on a case-by-case basis through a simple negotiation model. The trader and the customers are adapting their negotiation strategies based on their historical profits. We are interested in the general properties of the emerging information market: the amount of realizable profit and its distribution between the trader and customers, the business strategies necessary to keep the market operational (such as promotional deals), the price elasticity of demand and the impact of pricing strategies on the profit.Comment: Extended version of the paper published at Computer and Information Sciences, Proc. of ISCIS-26, 201