Description du projet
Aperçu de l’économie des services d’information
La croissance récente des services d’information a également entraîné une augmentation des externalités entre les agents économiques. Les informations sur les plateformes numériques, les moteurs de recherche et les réseaux de communication peuvent être considérés comme des biens publics, dont la production et l’échange entre deux parties peuvent bénéficier ou nuire à d’autres parties. Le projet ISECO, financé par le CER, entend étudier de manière approfondie la nature économique des services d’information, tant au niveau virtuel que physique, en mettant l’accent sur les externalités. Les objectifs de la recherche comprennent l’établissement d’une théorie pertinente sur la dynamique des marchés bifaces, l’étude des questions de conception, de droits à la vie privée et de frais de transaction, l’analyse de la tarification, le développement de modèles d’investissement dynamiques, ainsi que la création d’outils pour les responsables de la politique de la concurrence.
Objectif
This application aims at fostering our knowledge of the economics of information services by studying the strategic interactions between agents involved in the production and exchange of information services. In this context, externalities play a key role explored by this proposal. Their increasing prevalence in information services can be traced to three features:
- Many information services involve one-sided or two-sided network externalities.
- Information is a public good and the production and exchange of information between two parties may affect other parties in a positive or negative manner.
- Information services and physical infrastructures are complements.
Externalities arise in the two layers of the information society, the content level and the physical infrastructure. The proposal is then organized around four parts:
1. Background theory: two-sided markets, network dynamics, contractual externalities
2. Virtual layer: recommendation systems, privacy, transaction costs
3. Physical layer: pricing , investment
4. Competition policy for two-sided markets
The first part consists of the development of relevant theory with original and novel methods including for instance global games, coordination games and recent contract theory. The second part studies specific issues in information services such as the design of search engines and the right to privacy. It also includes empirical investigation of on-line transaction costs using proprietary data of transactions on e-commerce platforms. The third part is concerned with the infrastructure. It studies net-neutrality and the prices of data from the perspective of price theory, accounting for the gratuity of some services. It will also develop original dynamic investment models to understand the role of the complementarity between infrastructure and service innovation and the role of legacy. The last part will develop tools for competition policy makers.
Champ scientifique
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Régime de financement
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantInstitution d’accueil
31080 Toulouse
France