Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are an important determinant of productivity growth and innovation. This study examines the effects of sector regulation on innovation in telecommunications and related information industries. A typology of innovation processes in ICT industries is developed. The conditions conducive to innovation under varying economic conditions are explored t...

Considerable efforts have been made in recent years to produce detailed topologies of the Internet. Although Internet topology data have been brought to the attention of a wide and somewhat diverse audience of scholars, so far they have been overlooked by economists. In this paper, we suggest that such data could be effectively treated as a proxy to characterize the size of the “digital economy...

In an auction with a buy price, the seller provides bidders with an option to end the auction early by accepting a transaction at a posted price. The ”BuyIt-Now” option on eBay is a leading example of an auction with a buy price. This paper develops a model of an auction with a buy price in which bidders use the auction’s reserve price and buy price to formulate a reference price. The model bot...

This paper uses matching techniques to examine the impact of internet use on individual earnings in six Latin American countries using recent household surveys data. Given their different internet use patterns and their implications, the analysis is done for salaried and self-employed workers separately. While salaried workers users mainly access the internet at work, self employed users access...

Reputation mechanisms used by platform markets suffer from two problems. First, buyers may draw conclusions about the quality of the platform from single transactions, causing a reputational externality. Second, reputation measures may be coarse or biased, preventing buyers from making proper inferences. We document these problems using eBay data and claim that platforms can benefit from identi...

Proliferation of content on the internet offers consumers access to more sources than had been possible with traditional media. Disaggregated content also increases the relevance of targeting for advertisers. But at the same time, search costs increase the role of intermediaries in media consumption in ways that are poorly understood. This paper studies the effects of search technology and aggr...

This paper examines three software and/or information technology enabled services (ITES) industries—two in the early stages of development (in the People’s Republic of China [PRC] and the Philippines) and one mature one (in India). Being latecomers to offshoring work, the PRC and the Philippines have developed this industry in cooperation with multinational enterprises (MNEs). PRC firms have wo...

Open source software (OSS) is marked by free access to the software and its source code. OSS is developed by a ‘community’ consisting of thousands of contributors from all over the world. Some research was undertaken in order to analyze how global the OSS community actually is, i.e. analyze the geographic origin of OSS developers. But as members of the OSS community differ in their activity lev...

We conducted 80 auctions on eBay. Forty of these auctions were for various popular music CDs while the remaining 40 auctions were for video games for Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console. The revenue equivalence theorem states that any auction form having the same effective reserve price yields the same expected revenue. The effective reserve price on eBay consists of three components: the opening b...

This paper analyzes the causes of illegal copying and its effects in the software market across 66 countries. By studying the aggregated and joint effects of different variables, the analysis shows that supply constraints in the software market, shortage of after-sale support, and characteristics legal framework are major drivers of illegal copying when controlling for income per capita. It als...