Using massive online choice experiments to measure changes in well-being
Name
7250.full.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
588.47 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
124624a82fd8b3e693981d1c599b838c
Author(s)
Brynjolfsson, Erik
Collis, Avinash
Eggers, Felix
Date Issued
March 26, 2019
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Citation
Brynjolfsson, Erik, Avinash Collis and Felix Eggers. "Using massive online choice experiments to measure changes in well-being." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116 (2019): 7250-7255 © 2019 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Gross domestic product (GDP) and derived metrics such as productivity have been central to our understanding of economic progress and well-being. In principle, changes in consumer surplus provide a superior, and more direct, measure of changes in wellbeing, especially for digital goods. In practice, these alternatives have been difficult to quantify. We explore the potential of massive online choice experiments to measure consumer surplus. We illustrate this technique via several empirical examples which quantify the valuations of popular digital goods and categories. Our examples include incentive-compatible discrete-choice experiments where online and laboratory participants receive monetary compensation if and only if they forgo goods for predefined periods. For example, the median user needed a compensation of about $48 to forgo Facebook for 1 mo. Our overall analyses reveal that digital goods have created large gains in well-being that are not reflected in conventional measures of GDP and productivity. By periodically querying a large, representative sample of goods and services, including those which are not priced in existing markets, changes in consumer surplus and other new measures of well-being derived from these online choice experiments have the potential for providing cost-effective supplements to the existing national income and product accounts.
Subjects
Multidisciplinary
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1815663116
