Joel Waldfogel

...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.

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by Joel Waldfogel

Joel Waldfogel

@jwaldfog.bsky.social

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.

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by Joel Waldfogel

Joel Waldfogel

@jwaldfog.bsky.social

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.

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by Joel Waldfogel

Joel Waldfogel

@jwaldfog.bsky.social

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.

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by Joel Waldfogel

Joel Waldfogel

@jwaldfog.bsky.social

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.

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by Joel Waldfogel

Joel Waldfogel

@jwaldfog.bsky.social

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.

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by Joel Waldfogel

Joel Waldfogel

@jwaldfog.bsky.social

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

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

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Reposted by Joel Waldfogel

by Joel Waldfogel

Joel Waldfogel

@jwaldfog.bsky.social

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

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References

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