Did the rise of free information technology improve GDP? It is commonly assumed that it did.
After all, the Internet has changed the way we work, play, and shop. Smartphones and free apps are ubiquitous. Many forms of advertising moved online quite a while ago and support gazillions of “free” services. Free apps changed leisure long ago—just ask any teenager or any parent of a teenager. Shouldn’t that add up to a lot?
Luigi Butera and John List have examined how cooperation is impacted on by uncertainty — and not just any uncertainty but Knightian uncertainty where outcomes cannot easily be described by a probability distribution.
Technology policy has been a low priority for most voters in presidential elections in the post-war era. The most recent contest was no exception. Arguments about technology policy never made it into campaign commercials, to say the least, nor even a minute of the televised presidential debates.
So it goes.
Co-authored with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb
[This post appeared in HBR Online on March 28, 2017]
That is a question raised by the experience of a “rogue” neuroscientist profiled in Wired today:
As Snapchat (SNAP) nears its IPO, analysts have been pouring over its public documents. Ben Thompson found this interesting bit:
That is the title of a new paper by Avi Goldfarb, Mara Lederman and myself.
