Bay Area Tech Economics Seminar with Dr. Erik Brynjolfsson

Speaker: Erik Brynjolfsson, Stanford University 

Presentation Title: GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods in the Digital Economy

Abstract: The welfare contributions of new goods and free goods are not well-measured in our current national accounts. We derive explicit terms for the contributions of these goods and introduce a new framework and metric, GDP-B which quantifies their benefits. We apply this framework to several empirical examples including Facebook and smartphone cameras and estimate their valuations through incentive-compatible choice experiments. We find that including the gains from Facebook adds 0.05 to 0.11 percentage points to welfare growth per year while improvements in smartphones add approximately 0.63 percentage points per year.

Download the GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods paper here!

Speaker Bio: Dr. Erik Brynjolfsson is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He is the Ralph Landau Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and holds appointments at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford Department of Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

One of the most-cited authors on the economics of information, Brynjolfsson was among the first researchers to measure productivity contributions of IT and the complementary role of organizational capital and other intangibles. He has done pioneering research on digital commerce, the Long Tail, bundling and pricing models, intangible assets and the effects of IT on business strategy, productivity and performance.

Brynjolfsson speaks globally and is the author of nine books including, with co-author Andrew McAfee, best-seller The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, and Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future as well as over 100 academic articles and five patents. He holds Bachelors and Masters degrees from Harvard University in applied mathematics and decision sciences and a Ph.D. from MIT in managerial economics. His papers can be found here. 

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This talk is co-sponsored by USF's Master's in Applied Economics and the Stanford Causal Science Center. For additional information and abstracts from past talks, please click here.