A Network of Thrones: Kinship and Conflict in Europe, 1495–1918

We construct a database linking European royal kinship networks, monarchies, and wars to study the effect of family ties on conflict. To establish causality, we exploit decreases in connection caused by apolitical deaths of rulers\u27 mutual relatives. These deaths are associated with substantial increases in the frequency and duration of war. We provide evidence that these deaths affect conflict only through changing the kinship network. Over our period of interest, the percentage of European monarchs with kinship ties increased threefold. Together, these findings help explain the well-documented decrease in European war frequency

Evaluating Antitrust Remedies for Platform Monopolies: The Case of Facebook

This Article advances a framework to assess antitrust remedies and policy interventions for platform monopolies. As prosecutors and regulators barrel forward against digital platforms, soon it will fall upon courts and administrative agencies to devise remedies. We argue that any sensible solution must include quantification of the welfare effects on a platform’s various constituents. The Benzell-Collis model predicts the effects of proposed solutions on a platform’s profits and the welfare of its users. The model also considers additional aspects of welfare unique to the social media setting, such as digital platforms’ nonmonetary goals, platform addiction, and externalities from platform use. Applied to Meta’s Facebook, the model captures the nuances of demand for the social network to predict the consequences of reforms such as taxes, divestitures, and user rebates. We estimate the magnitude of effects by calibrating a version of the model through surveys of U.S. internet users regarding their demand for Facebook. This approach is based on the theoretical and empirical literature on multisided platforms from economists, including, most prominently, the Nobel laureate Jean Tirole. We find that breakups which undercut Facebook’s network effects are the most damaging solutions. By contrast, properly designed taxes and user unionization might raise the total surplus of the platform, even without creating more competition. We also canvass other interventions, gauging their abilities to maximize the benefits to consumers of engaging with Facebook. This Article’s primary contribution is to ground debates over platform monopolies in tangible, quantifiable terms rather than grand, open-ended aspirations. Each of the estimates in our formulation of welfare is subject to pushback, but by embracing quantification, we aim to elevate the theoretical discourse in antitrust. Ultimately, we hope that the model forces remedy designers to confront-—and publicize-—how they quantify welfare effects upon consumers and, more broadly, society

Evaluating Antitrust Remedies for Platform Monopolies: The Case of Facebook

This Article advances a framework to assess antitrust remedies and policy interventions for platform monopolies. As prosecutors and regulators barrel forward against digital platforms, soon it will fall upon courts and administrative agencies to devise remedies. We argue that any sensible solution must include quantification of the welfare effects on a platform’s various constituents. The Benzell-Collis model predicts the effects of proposed solutions on a platform’s profits and the welfare of its users. The model also considers additional aspects of welfare unique to the social media setting, such as digital platforms’ nonmonetary goals, platform addiction, and externalities from platform use. Applied to Meta’s Facebook, the model captures the nuances of demand for the social network to predict the consequences of reforms such as taxes, divestitures, and user rebates. We estimate the magnitude of effects by calibrating a version of the model through surveys of U.S. internet users regarding their demand for Facebook. This approach is based on the theoretical and empirical literature on multisided platforms from economists, including, most prominently, the Nobel laureate Jean Tirole. We find that breakups which undercut Facebook’s network effects are the most damaging solutions. By contrast, properly designed taxes and user unionization might raise the total surplus of the platform, even without creating more competition. We also canvass other interventions, gauging their abilities to maximize the benefits to consumers of engaging with Facebook. This Article’s primary contribution is to ground debates over platform monopolies in tangible, quantifiable terms rather than grand, open-ended aspirations. Each of the estimates in our formulation of welfare is subject to pushback, but by embracing quantification, we aim to elevate the theoretical discourse in antitrust. Ultimately, we hope that the model forces remedy designers to confront-—and publicize-—how they quantify welfare effects upon consumers and, more broadly, society

The Efficiency of U.S. Public Space Utilization During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has called for and generated massive novel government regulations to increase social distancing for the purpose of reducing disease transmission. A number of studies have attempted to guide and measure the effectiveness of these policies, but there has been less focus on the overall efficiency of these policies. Efficient social distancing requires implementing stricter restrictions during periods of high viral prevalence and rationing social contact to disproportionately preserve gatherings that produce a good ratio of benefits to transmission risk. To evaluate whether U.S. social distancing policy actually produced an efficient social distancing regime, we tracked consumer preferences for, visits to, and crowding in public locations of 26 different types. We show that the United States’ rationing of public spaces, postspring 2020, has failed to achieve efficiency along either dimension. In April 2020, the United States did achieve notable decreases in visits to public spaces and focused these reductions at locations that offer poor benefit-to-risk tradeoffs. However, this achievement was marred by an increase, from March to April, in crowding at remaining locations due to fewer locations remaining open. In December 2020, at the height of the pandemic so far, crowding in and total visits to locations were higher than in February, before the U.S. pandemic, and these increases were concentrated in locations with the worst value-to-risk tradeoff

How APIs Create Growth by Inverting the Firm

Traditional asset management strategy has emphasized building barriers to entry or closely guarding unique assets to maintain a firm’s comparative advantage. A new “Inverted Firm” paradigm, however, has emerged. Under this strategy, firms share data seeking to become platforms by opening digital services to third-parties and capturing part of their external surplus. This contrasts with a “pipeline” strategy where the firm itself creates value. This paper quantitatively estimates the effect of adopting an inverted firm strategy through the lens of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), a key enabling technology. Using both public data and that of a private API development firm, we document rapid growth of the API network and connecting apps since 2005. We then perform difference-in-difference and synthetic control analyses and find that public firms adopting public APIs grew an additional 38.7% relative to similar nonadopters. We find no significant effect from the use of APIs purely for internal productivity, the pipeline strategy. Within the subset of firms that adopt public APIs, those that attract more third-party complementors and those that become more central to the network see faster growth. Using variation in network centrality caused by API degradation, an instrumental variables analysis confirms a causal role for APIs in firm market value. Finally, we document an important downside of external API adoption: increased risk of data breach. Overall, these facts lead us to conclude that APIs have a large and positive impact on economic growth and do so primarily by enabling an inverted firm as opposed to pipeline strategy

Rationing Social Contact During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Transmission Risk and Social Benefits of US Locations

To prevent the spread of COVID-19, some types of stores and gathering places have been shut down while others remain open. The decision to shut down one type of location and leave another open constitutes a judgement about the relative danger and benefits of those locations. Using location data from a large sample of smartphones, nationally representative consumer preference surveys, and government statistics, we measure the relative transmission risk benefit and social cost of closing about thirty different location categories in the US. Our categories include types of shops, entertainments, and public spaces. Our main analysis ranks twenty-six categories by those which should face stricter regulation via dominance across eight dimensions of risk and importance and through composite indexes. We find that from February to March, there were larger declines in visits to locations that our measures imply should be closed first. We hope this analysis will help policymakers decide how to reopen their economies

Need-Supporting Gamification in Education: An Assessment of Motivational Effects Over Time

Although many studies have focused on the potential of implementing gamification in education, the existing literature remains inconclusive about its effectiveness. In order to make sense of the contradictory findings regarding the effectiveness of implementing game design elements in an online learning environment, this paper complements the available body of research by addressing three holes. We have (1) analysed gamification’s underlying motivational processes from a Self-Determination Theory-perspective, thereby accounting for the motivational effects of various game design implementations; (2) empirically assessed subtle motivational changes over time, and (3) accounted for the potential individual differences in motivational effects of gamification. Over a period of 15 weeks, we administered four surveys to measure the possible evolution in students’ (N = 40) motivational levels in response to interacting with need-supporting game elements that were implemented in Google+ Communities used in a university course. Participants’ autonomous and controlled motivation was curve linear, showing an initial downward trend that surprisingly shifted to an upward tendency towards the end of the semester. Their controlled motivation stayed stable throughout. The results illustrated the significance of the individual nature of motivational processes, the importance of sensitive longitudinal motivation measurements, and the relevance of the implemented game elements’ design characteristics. We end this article by opening the debate on using theoretical lenses when designing gamification, and by providing avenues for future research.status: publishe

SIMULATING RUSSIA’S AND OTHER LARGE ECONOMIES’ CHALLENGING AND INTERCONNECTED TRANSITIONS

This paper develops a large-scale, dynamic life-cycle model to simulate Russia’s demographic and fiscal transition under favorable and unfavorable fossil-fuel price regimes. The model includes Russia, the U.S., China, India, the EU, and Japan+ (Japan plus Korea). The model predicts dramatic increases in tax rates in the U.S., EU, India, and Russia. Indeed, the increases are so large as to question their political feasibility let alone their actual collection given the potential for tax avoidance and tax evasion

Interdependence and the Cost of Uncoordinated Responses to COVID-19

Social distancing is the core policy response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). But, as federal, state and local governments begin opening businesses and relaxing shelter-in-place orders worldwide, we lack quantitative evidence on how policies in one region affect mobility and social distancing in other regions and the consequences of uncoordinated regional policies adopted in the presence of such spillovers. To investigate this concern, we combined daily, county-level data on shelter-in-place policies with movement data from over 27 million mobile devices, social network connections among over 220 million Facebook users, daily temperature and precipitation data from 62,000 weather stations, and county-level census data on population demographics to estimate the geographic and social network spillovers created by regional policies across the United States. Our analysis shows that the contact patterns of people in a given region are significantly influenced by the policies and behaviors of people in other, sometimes distant, regions. When just one-third of a state\u27s social and geographic peer states adopt shelter-in-place policies, it creates a reduction in mobility equal to the state\u27s own policy decisions. These spillovers are mediated by peer travel and distancing behaviors in those states. A simple analytical model calibrated with our empirical estimates demonstrated that the loss from anarchy in uncoordinated state policies is increasing in the number of noncooperating states and the size of social and geographic spillovers. These results suggest a substantial cost of uncoordinated government responses to COVID-19 when people, ideas, and media move across borders