Joel Waldfogel
@jwaldfog.bsky.social
Business
42%
Economics
29%
Joel Waldfogel
@jwaldfog.bsky.social
· May 30
The Welfare Effects of Gender-Inclusive Intellectual Property Creation: Evidence from Books | Journal of Political Economy
Women have traditionally participated in intellectual property creation at depressed rates relative to men. Book authorship is now an exception: women now publish more than half of new books. Adding n...
www.journals.uchicago.edu
It's a nice coming-out party for the paper. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
Joel Waldfogel
@jwaldfog.bsky.social
· May 30
All the sad young literary men
Today, Explained · Episode
open.spotify.com
I had a lot of fun discussing the growth of female authorship on the Today, Explained podcast. open.spotify.com/episode/2XGc...
Joel Waldfogel
@jwaldfog.bsky.social
· Jan 27
Our bottom line: there is a lot of regret and missed opportunity in current differentiated product consumption (and not just with gifts).
Joel Waldfogel
@jwaldfog.bsky.social
· Jan 27
...and the relationship between individuals’ tendency to own games and the games’ average playtimes supports this assumption. We do a bunch of other stuff to explore robustness.
Joel Waldfogel
@jwaldfog.bsky.social
· Jan 27
Nerdy caveats: Our users choose among 100 games; we make the bundle choice problem tractable by specifying utility as a function of hours of playtime and money spent. This presumes that marginal utilities of different games are proportional to the playtime they deliver.
Joel Waldfogel
@jwaldfog.bsky.social
· Jan 27
Second, using a model of game bundle choice, we measure the welfare gain from full information as the loss of money to bring consumers from full information down to their status quo choices. Full information would raise CS by 30 percent more than baseline expenditure.
Joel Waldfogel
@jwaldfog.bsky.social
· Jan 27
We develop a two-part model for measuring the welfare gain with full information. First, full information would raise the size of the budget set by allowing consumers to buy the games yielding the most playtime first.
Joel Waldfogel
@jwaldfog.bsky.social
· Jan 27
We have unusual data on post-purchase usage providing big hints about regret: Users could have achieved 90 percent of their status quo playtime with 60 percent less expenditure.
Joel Waldfogel
@jwaldfog.bsky.social
· Jan 27
We don’t know much about this, for two reasons. 1) we rarely see post-purchase usage, 2) welfare analysis proceeds from assumptions of revealed preference. If you paid 10 dollars for something, it must have been worth at least 10 dollars to you.
Joel Waldfogel
@jwaldfog.bsky.social
· Jan 27
Information and the Welfare Benefits from Differentiated Products
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...
www.nber.org
With differentiated products and heterogeneous consumers, it may be hard for choices to deliver maximal welfare. We might regret choices we make, and we might miss out on products we would have enjoyed. @imkereimers.bsky.social, Christoph Riedl, and I explore this www.nber.org/papers/w33401
Joel Waldfogel
@jwaldfog.bsky.social
· Apr 8
The EU's Digital Markets Act has outlawed self-preferencing by big platforms. Shortly after Amazon's designation as a "gatekeeper" in 9/23, the search rank advantage for Amazon-brand products fell a bunch. Working paper: www.nber.org/papers/w32299