Mensurando os benefícios econômicos da internet

When her two-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer in 1992, Judy Mollica spent hours in a nearby medical library in south Florida, combing through journals for information about her child’s condition. Upon seeing an unfamiliar term she would stop and hunt down its meaning elsewhere in the library. It was, she says, like “walking in the dark”. Her daughter recovered but in 2005 was diagnosed with a different form of cancer. This time, Ms Mollica was able to stay by her side. She could read articles online, instantly look up medical and scientific terms on Wikipedia, and then follow footnotes to new sources. She could converse with her daughter’s specialists like a fellow doctor. Wikipedia, she says, not only saved her time but gave her a greater sense of control. “You can’t put a price on that.”

Measuring the economic impact of all the ways the internet has changed people’s lives is devilishly difficult because so much of it has no price. It is easier to quantify the losses Wikipedia has inflicted on encyclopedia publishers than the benefits it has generated for users like Ms Mollica. This problem is an old one in economics. GDP measures monetary transactions, not welfare. Consider someone who would pay $50 for the latest Harry Potter novel but only has to pay $20. The $30 difference represents a non-monetary benefit called “consumer surplus”. The amount of internet activity that actually shows up in GDP—Google’s ad sales, for example—significantly understates its contribution to welfare by excluding the consumer surplus that accrues to Google’s users. The hard question to answer is by how much.

Shane Greenstein of Northwestern University and Ryan McDevitt of the University of Rochester calculated the consumer surplus generated by the spread of broadband access (which ought to include the surplus generated by internet services, since that is why consumers pay for broadband). They did so by constructing a demand curve. Say that in 1999 a person pays $20 a month for internet access. By 2006 the spread of broadband has lowered the real price to $17. That subscriber now enjoys consumer surplus of $3 per year, even as the lower price lures more subscribers. The authors reckon that by 2006 broadband was generating $39 billion in revenue and $5 billion-$7 billion in consumer surplus a year. Based on its share of online viewing, Mr Greenstein thinks Wikipedia accounted for up to $50m of that surplus.

Such numbers probably understate things. The authors’ calculations assume internet access meant the same thing in 2006 as it did in 1999. But the advent of new services such as Google and Facebook meant internet access in 2006 was worth much more than in 1999. So the surplus would have been bigger, too.

More important, consumers may not incorporate the value of free internet services when deciding what to pay for internet access. Another approach is simply to ask consumers what they would pay if they had to. In a study commissioned by IAB Europe, a web-advertising industry group, McKinsey, a consultancy, asked 3,360 consumers in six countries what they would pay for 16 internet services that are now largely financed by ads. On average, households would pay €38 ($50) a month each for services they now get free. After subtracting the costs associated with intrusive ads and forgone privacy, McKinsey reckoned free ad-supported internet services generated €32 billion of consumer surplus in America and €69 billion in Europe. E-mail accounted for 16% of the total surplus across America and Europe, search 15% and social networks 11%.

Another way to infer consumer surplus is from the time saved using the internet. In a paper partly funded by Google, Yan Chen, Grace YoungJoo Jeon and Yong-Mi Kim, all of the University of Michigan, asked a team of researchers to answer questions culled from web searches. The questions included teasers like: “In making cookies, does the use of butter or margarine affect the size of the cookie?” On average, it took participants seven minutes to answer the questions using a search engine, and 22 minutes using the University of Michigan’s library. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, then calculated that those savings worked out to 3.75 minutes per day for the typical user. Assigning that time a value of $22 per hour (the average wage in America), he reckons search generates $500 of consumer surplus per user annually, or $65 billion-$150 billion nationally.

Twitter: the defence

Yet another technique is to assign a value to the leisure time spent on the web. Erik Brynjolfsson and Joo Hee Oh of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology note that between 2002 and 2011, the amount of leisure time Americans spent on the internet rose from 3 to 5.8 hours per week. The authors conclude that in so far as consumers must have valued their time on the internet more than the alternatives, this increase must reflect a growing consumer surplus from the internet, which they value at $564 billion in 2011, or $2,600 per user. Had this growth in surplus been included in GDP, it would have raised economic growth since 2002 by 0.39 percentage points on average.

These are impressive figures, but they also merit scepticism. Would consumers really pay $2,600 for the internet? Shouldn’t other free leisure activities, such as watching television or—heaven forbid—playing with your children, have just as much value? And in other ways the internet subtracts value: the productivity destroyed by incessant checking of Twitter, the human interactions replaced by e-mail. Ms Mollica says people in hospital waiting rooms used to develop a camaraderie rooted in their shared experiences. “But now everyone stares into their phone because they’re texting or e-mailing.”

Fonte: aqui

Valor dos mecanismo de busca da internet

MEASURING the value of a good is much trickier than measuring the cost, since value inherently involves consideration of a hypothetical: what would your life be like without that good? 

Economists commonly use two measures to assign monetary value to some good or service: the "compensating variation" and the "equivalent variation". The compensating variation asks how much money we would have to give a person to make up for taking the good away from them while the equivalent variation asks how much money someone would give up to acquire the good in question. The term "consumer surplus" refers to an approximation to these theoretically ideal measures.

If we want to estimate "the value of Google search" we have to look at both the commercial and non-commercial aspects of search: users are searching for answers to questions (some of which are commercial in nature) and advertisers are searching for customers for (mostly) commercial transactions. So is useful to break the problem up into two pieces: the value of ads to advertisers and publishers, and the value of search results to users.

Suppose Google were to disappear tomorrow. In the first instance, advertisers and publishers would lose a lot of visitors to their web sites.  How much are those lost visitors worth to them? This is the question I tried to answer in the "value of Google" study. The tricky part is ascribing a value to the advertisers of those web site visitors, but it turns out there is a way to infer that value from advertising bidding behavior. This allows us to get a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the immediate loss in value from Google vanishing.

Of course, "if Google did not exist, man would have to invent it". So we would expect that as the weeks went on, users would start to use other search engines, and advertisers would spend advertising dollars in different ways, and publishers would find other ways to get ad dollars for their web sites. 

So the long-run loss in value would be substantially less than the immediate impact. Ultimately the lost value would be the difference between Google and the next best advertising alternative but that would be almost impossible to estimate given the available data.

Turning to the user side, we drew on the work of Yan Chen, Grace YoungJoo Jeon and Yong-Mi Kim of the University of Michigan to estimate the value of online search in general.

Some of us are old enough to remember what life was like before search engines. We had to look through a pile of reference books to find the answers to basic questions. Even small questions, like how to spell a word, or whether it was likely to the rain the next day, required some effort to answer. Even trivia was hardly trivial: finding obscure facts involved substantial research.

So one way to measure the value of online search would be to measure how much time it saves us compared to methods we used in the bad old days before Google. Based on a random sample of Google queries, the UM researchers found that answering them using the library took about 22 minutes while answering them using Google took 7 minutes. Overall, Google saved 15 minutes of time. (This calculation ignores the cost of actually going to the library, which in some cases was quite substantial. The UM authors also looked at questions posed to reference librarians as well and got a similar estimate of time saved.)

I attempted to convert this time to dollar savings using the average wage and came up with about $500 per adult worker per year. This may seem like a lot, but it works out to just $1.37 a day. I would guess that most readers of this blog get $1.37 worth of value per day out of their search engine use.

When doing this calculation, it is important to take account of the fact that since the cost of getting answers is now so low, we ask a lot more questions. When getting an answer involved a trip to the library and 22 minutes to answer an average question, we only attempted to get answers to important questions. Now that it involves only a few minutes at a search engine to answer questions, we ask many more—and a lot less valuable—questions.

Said another way, we wouldn't bother to even to go to the library unless we were willing to spend at least 22 minutes (on average) to find the answer. Now that it takes us only a few seconds or minutes to get an answer, we ask a lot of frivolous questions (along with the important ones, of course.)

Taking this effect into account involves estimating a "demand curve for questions" as a function of the "cost of getting answers". I don't know any serious research on this topic, so I made a rough approximation to that demand curve and came up with the $1.37 a day figure. It could be larger or it could be smaller, but I think that is the right order of magnitude.

There are many other ways to estimate the value of the internet and the services it provides. However, to the extent that they are based on current practices, they likely underestimate the long-term value of the internet. 

It is now possible for everyone on the planet to have access to all the information humans have ever produced.  The barriers to this utopian dream are not technological, but legal and economic.  When we manage to solve these problems, we will be able to unlock vast pools of human potential that have hitherto been inaccessible.  In the future this will be viewed as a turning point in human history, and economic advances generated by global access to all information will be recognised as the true value of the internet.

Fonte:aqui