Digital Goods

The study — starting from the analysis of the concept of good
in the legal perspective, its nature and its application profiles —
outlines the issue of new digital intangible goods, in light of the
recent european legislation on content supply contracts and
digital services, with particular attention to information and
personal data.
It is proposed to build — through the interpretation of the art.
810 c.c. as a constitutional norm in a wide material sense — a
taxonomy of new digital intangible assets with the aim of overcoming,
in the specific context of the digital markets, the traditional
rigid dominion perspective in favour of a more actual and
flexible non exclusive contractual circulatory dimension.

Despite global efforts to harmonize international trade statistics, our understanding about trade in digital products and its implications remains elusive. Here, we study five key aspects of trade in digital products by introducing a novel dataset on the exports and imports of digital products. First, we show that compared to trade in physical goods, the origin of digital products exports is more spatially concentrated. Second, we show that between 2016 and 2021 trade in digital products grew faster than physical trade, at an annualized growth rate of 20% compared to 6% for physical trade. Third, we show that trade in digital products is large enough to partly offset some important trade balance estimates, like the physical trade deficit of the United States. Fourth, we show that countries that have decoupled economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions have larger and faster growing exports in digital product sectors. Finally, we add digital products to measures of economic complexity, showing that digital products tend to rank high in terms of sophistication contributing positively to the complexity of digital exporters. These findings provide a novel lens to understand the impact of the digital sector in the evolving geography of global trade.

This paper explores the distinctive features of digital goods—such as durability, low reproduction costs, and scalability—and their economic consequences. Unlike traditional goods, digital products don’t wear out, can be reproduced at near-zero cost, and allow for easy versioning and complex pricing strategies. These characteristics challenge conventional economic models, particularly in terms of monopoly power, competition, and market dynamics.
The paper discusses concepts like the Coase Conjecture, which suggests monopolistic pricing may approach competitive levels, and Schumpeter’s creative destruction, highlighting the disruptive potential of new entrants. It also examines how network effects and economies of scale can lead to digital monopolies, while offering strategies for companies to optimize pricing and variant production. Lastly, the paper addresses regulatory issues and the need for policies that ensure market openness and innovation.
Keywords: digital goods, pricing, Coase Conjecture, creative destruction, digital monopolies, software economics, market dynamics, innovation, digital economy.

Die Digitalisierung hat eine neue Ära wirtschaftlicher Innovation eingeleitet, geprägt durch digitale Güter, die sich fundamental von klassischen Industrieprodukten unterscheiden. Plattformen wie Spotify, Airbnb, Uber oder Meta Platforms veranschaulichen, wie disruptive Technologien ganze Branchen transformieren. Dieser Beitrag untersucht die einzigartigen Eigenschaften digitaler Güter – darunter ihre Unzerstörbarkeit, kostengünstige Reproduzierbarkeit, effiziente Variantenproduktion und die komplexe Preisbildung. Es werden zentrale ökonomische Herausforderungen wie die Tendenz zur Monopolbildung, der Einfluss von Netzwerkeffekten und die Rolle disruptiver Innovationen analysiert. Zusätzlich beleuchtet der Artikel Strategien, die Unternehmen einsetzen können, um Wettbewerbsvorteile zu sichern, wie künstliche Abnutzung, Produktdifferenzierung und dynamische Preisgestaltung. Abschließend wird hervorgehoben, dass die erfolgreiche Navigation in der digitalen Wirtschaft nicht nur technisches Verständnis, sondern auch ein digitales Mindset erfordert.

Schlüsselwörter
Digitale Güter, Digitale Transformation, Digitalwirtschaft, Netzwerkeffekte, Disruptive Innovation, Künstliche Abnutzung, Produktdifferenzierung, Skaleneffekte, Digitale Preisstrategien, Monopolbildung, Wettbewerbsstrategie, Digitales Mindset, Disruption,

We propose a rigorous modeling framework for characterizing the structural ability of organizations to respond quickly and effectively to unanticipated events. As such, we seek to provide a theoretical basis for improved crisis management strategies. Our framework conceptualizes organizations as adaptive, responsive networks. Most of the existing models of complex social networks to date, however, have not explicitly modeled human capacity constraints or system congestion. As a result, no viable frameworks exist for investigating the responsiveness of various organizational structures under crisis conditions. Our approach proposes to integrate the social network approach to modeling communication and collaboration with the flow network approach from production systems modeling to represent task processing and flow under crisis conditions. By providing analytic structure to decision making enviromnents currently viewed as not amenable to formal methods, this research, we hope, will help improve the performance of various organizations in both the private and public sectors.

Do firms derive economic returns from business-to-business (B2B) initiatives? How do returns to startup firms compare to those for established firms in B2B initiatives? How do returns to B2B initiatives around digital goods compare to those involving tangible goods? We offer a rigorous definition of B2B then conduct an empirical test of incomplete contract theory to examine the returns to B2B electronic commerce (EC) initiatives focused on digital goods versus tangible goods, and the returns to Internet firms versus brick-and-mortar firms. While there seems to be little difference between digital and tangible initiatives, we find that the returns to Internet firms are significant while the returns to brick-and-mortar firms are not. We propose, based on the application of incomplete contract theory, that this result obtains because the addition of new partners in the EC channel undermines existing relationships in the conventional channel. At the same time, existing relationships in the conventional channel undermine the quality of new relationships in the EC channel. However, Internet firms, with their single channel focus, avoid this difficultly and thus experience significant returns from B2B EC initiatives.

This is the 10 th international workshop for technical, economic, and legal aspects of business models for virtual goods incorporating the 8 th ODRL community group meeting. This year we did not call for completed research results, but we invited PhD students to present and discuss their ongoing research work. In the traditional international group of virtual goods and ODRL researchers we discussed PhD research from Belgium, Brazil, and Germany. The topics focused on research questions about rights management in the Internet and e-business stimulation. In the center of rights management stands the conception of a formal policy expression that can be used for human readable policy transparency, as well as for machine readable support of policy conformant systems behavior up to automatic policy enforcement. ODRL has proven to be an ideal basis for policy expressions, not only for digital copy rights, but also for the more general "Policy Awareness in the World of Virtual Goods". In this sense, policies support the communication of virtual goods, and they are a virtualization of rules-governed behavior themselves. The virtual goods and ODRL workshop series have worked on the progress of ODRL language development and usage. The PhD workshop 2012 follows this line of research tradition. In three of the research works discussed, policy usage plays an important role, namely for usage rights management (D.

Superstar architecture can play a key role in the global positioning of museums in influential mass media, thereby successfully attracting cultural tourism (e.g. the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, GMB). Yet, an evident shortcoming is the mapping of media positioning. The aim of this article is precisely to draw and visualize this positioning of the GMB through networks. Two innovative features characterize this study: first, from a theoretical point of view, it links the debate on Superstar Museums to the broader economic debate on Superstar Economics. Akin to Rosen's hypothesis, in the case of Superstar Museums, the media exposure is concentrated among a handful of museums. In this context, the authors highlight the role of networks. The central nodes in the networks utilized for the study, depict/stand for museums that have the maximum visibility in the international media. The second innovative feature of the article is the analysis of co-citation networks in articles of the New York Times for two periods (1995-2000 and 2014-2019). The network graphs map the results of this article: the GMB positioned itself effectively with its inauguration in 1997. In addition, 20 years later the GMB still remains quite well positioned.

Despite their potentially transformative impact, few studies have investigated how commercially-driven digital platforms such as mobile money facilitate ecosystem value co-creation in the global South. Consequently, using a boundary resources model and platform governance approaches, this paper aims to examine how a payment platform facilitates ecosystem value co-creation with third party actors. An in-depth qualitative inquiry was adopted for the study using an embedded single-case design. The results show that although ecosystem value co-creation was enabled by the introduction of boundary resources tools, some platform governance practices hindered some complementors from harnessing the affordances of the platforms. These constraints include lack of visibility of the boundary resources and transparency challenges in the acceptance criteria. We thus argue that platform generativity on its own is not sufficient to support ecosystem value co-creation, but requires appropriate platform governance to deal with behavioural complexity of ecosystem actors by using optimal control mechanisms.

The paper proposes an analytical framework for comparing different business models for producing information goods and digital services. It is based on three dimensions that also refer to contrasted literature: the economics of matching, the economics of assembling and the economics of knowledge management. Our framework attempts to identify the principal trade-offs at the core of choices among alternative digital business models, and to compare them in terms of competitiveness and efficiency. It also highlights the role played by users in the production of information goods and competition with pure suppliers.

I accept responsibility for all errors that remain. 1 Globalisation is also used in the (earlier) literature to refer to earlier developments, such as the rise of transnational corporations. See eg J.G. Williamson, 'Winners and Losers over Two Centuries of Globalization' (NBER Working Paper no. 9161, 2002), at <www.nber.org/papers/w9161> (last visited 15 April 2011). R.S. Avi-Yonah, 'Globalization, Tax Competition, and the Fiscal Crisis of the Welfare State' (2000) 113 Harvard Law Review 1573, 1575 points out that the development of world trade in the decades before World War I can also be seen as an episode of globalisation.

This article investigates the ways content producers, marketers, and other promotional stakeholders work to optimize cultural goods and services for platform-dependent production, distribution, and monetization. We are particularly interested in how content creators find novel ways to work within, around, and even against platform politics and policies by manipulating algorithms, business models, and guidelines, or otherwise readying their content for optimal circulation on multiple platforms. Through comparative cases of music, games, and apps that draw on trade press and industry discourse, institutional and financial analysis, and select interviews with musicians, we consider various forms of, and strategies for, what we call cultural optimization. We draw on these instances to better understand the similarities and differences in the optimization of cultural content and metadata for economic or cultural gains. We hope our comparative approach reveals different conceptions of the term optimization, and that this term-in all its digital, financial, and cybernetic connotations-might prompt new ways of thinking about the interactions between content, (meta)data, platforms, and culture that have long shaped the circulation of cultural goods.

Increased use of the Internet for the distribution of digital products allows firms to embrace new business models. These models provide higher levels of product customization. In search of a better match between products and consumers' willingness to pay, many online and mobile content providers have recently started to add new charging methods to their existing pricing strategies. Currently, a gap exists between a firm's decision to implement a pricing mechanism and the firm's consideration of consumers' behavior towards acceptance of that pricing mechanism. What can firms do to better align their revenue models with consumers' behavioral norms? If an answer exists, and we will offer one, it will directly relate to the design, implementation and pricing of information goods. From the point of view of an online content provider this paper examines implications of one of the many types of consumers' economic anomalies: mental accounting (MA). More specifically, we look at how mental accounting (MA) of payment for and consumption of digital content at the consumer level impacts firm level choices of pricing strategies. Our results show that MA of payments and consumptions change firms' pricing strategy for digital content. For the firm which has high digital content customization level, pay-per-use and pay-later strategies are always inferior to subscription. In contrast, under neoclassical assumptions, firms are equally well-off from employing any price scheme. Our results also show that in a duopolistic market for information goods, firms must be knowledgeable of MA's influence on the market. MA's influence is magnified if the level of customization is a further differentiating factor. We present general conditions under which profits increase with the intensity of MA. Also, our results offer insights into the choice of pricing schemes by content distribution networks as well as mobile service providers and may provide an explanation as to how economic and behavioral aspects of digital consumption may interact.

The purpose of study is to evaluate the role and importance of e-information usage in struggle with informality in terms of accounting practices in Turkey. Revenue Administration has been working on efficient usage of e-information to collect taxes full and timely by using modern methods. In this context, e-declaration, e-invoice, e-ledger and e-notification are put into effect. So the annual reports and changes over the years were examined contextually and evaluated in terms of preventing informality. E-information applications which directly affect accounting profession and its practices by saving time, reducing transaction costs and bringing important results in processes; provide efficiency in auditing and inspection with remote access, fast mobility in operations, decrease in collection costs and increase in collection/accrual rate. E-information applications are important in struggle with informality even if not at the desired level.

Метою статті є аналіз перспектив упровадження цифрової валюти центрального банку в українській економіці. Е-гривня може стати альтернативою традиційним інструментам платіжних операцій, забезпечуючи простішу, захищенішу та надійнішу можливість здійснювати оплати за послуги, товари та різноманітні транзакції. У статті розглядаються питання впровадження е-гривні як цифрової валюти центрального банку в Україні. Розглянуті питання пов’язані з економічною сутністю е-гривні, досліджено еволюцію форм грошей, виділено основні характеристики цифрової валюти центрального банку, оцінено стан платіжної інфраструктури в Україні та можливості її використання для впровадження е-гривні. На основі проведеного аналізу зроблено такі висновки щодо перспектив упровадження е-гривні в Україні. Інфраструктура для безготівкових розрахунків в Україні добре розвинена. У країні діє велика кількість засобів для операцій з платіжними картками, зокрема платіжні термінали в торговельній та сервісній мережах. У сусідніх Польщі та Румунії є більша кількість терміналів у розрахунку на 100 осіб, водночас в Україні більша частка безготівкових платежів порівняно з даними країнами. І обсяг цих безготівкових операцій постійно зростає. Це пояснюється тим, що в Україні добре розвинуто інфраструктуру для платежів з картки на картку, що не потребує додаткового обладнання для операцій з платіжними картками. Порівняно меншу кількість засобів для операцій з платіжними картками можна не вважати показником менш розвиненої платіжної інфраструктури. В Україні спостерігається зростання кількості безконтактних карток і токенізованих карток. Враховуючи дані фактори, можна зробити висновок про те, що платіжна інфраструктура є досить розвиненою для впровадження цифрової валюти центрального банку, якою буде е-гривня. Впровадження е-гривні в Україні є реалістичним і може мати позитивний вплив на розвиток економіки та фінансової системи України.

6 years since Digital India initiative, there are many benefits reaped. From myGov, world's largest digital democracy platform, to Creation of Aadhaar database, world's largest biometric-based digital identity; India has started its digital revolution. With nearly 700 million internet users across the country, digital India has become an integral part of everyone's lives. But there remains a digital gender divide that can cost India its development. A nation moves forward when its women move ahead. Women are the engine of sustainable economies, benefiting both societies and humankind. My study aims at showing the importance of rural Indian women for the Indian economy. The number of women who have access to internet is much lower than men in the country, and the bias becomes wider in rural India. Without digital literacy, this vulnerable group may find themselves too far behind to ever catch up with "Digital India." Prime Minister Narendra Modi's goal for Digital India is groundbreaking. It has the potential to create an evolution in India, with rural India poised to receive largest benefits. But both, women and men should be the receiver of this campaign for it to be a true success. At the end of my study, one will be able to deduce the importance of rural women in a workforce.

Digital markets offer abundant free content but exhibit extreme concentration among content aggregation intermediaries. These characteristics are linked. In commoditized weak-IP markets, firms earn revenues by bundling free content for users with positively priced advertising services for firms. Intermediaries promote content commoditization, and the resulting reallocation of market rents from content producers to content aggregators, through free content distribution and political-influence activities that weaken copyright protections. The expected welfare effects raise concern. Scale economies, network effects, "infinite inventory", ecosystem effects, and learning effects promote winner-take-all outcomes in the intermediary market while weak IP rights skew investment toward low-cost, short-lived projects in the content market. *

This study examines how consumers collect, organize, and categorize images they find using Pinterest, a bookmarking and image sharing website. We re-visit McCracken’s (1986) theory of cultural meaning of consumer goods in the age of digital consumption to determine how virtual possessions have become an integral part of the user’s extended self (Belk 1988). Based on interviews, netnography, and participant-observation, our findings shed light on the possession rituals of digital consumers. We found that consumers’ image collection activities include claiming, personalizing, storing and hoarding, and sharing. Our research demonstrates how consumers engage in digital possession rituals and how they develop a symbolic sense of ownership even though they only possess a visual representation of that item and not the physical product.

Введение: в современном мире в различных сферах деятельности появляются новые проблемы, решение которых достигается использованием технологии распределенного реестра. Переход к данной технологии обусловлен тем, что централизованные системы уже не могут гарантировать требуемый уровень доступности и надежности, а распределенные общедоступные системы все еще находятся в ранней фазе развития. Цель: анализ применимости технологии распределенного реестра в таких отраслях, как экономика, энергетика, финансы, логистика, торговля и интернет вещей. Результаты: проведен систематический обзор исследований в области технологии распределенного реестра. Выявлены основные проблемы интеграции технологии в существующие отрасли: отсутствие единой системы для хранения данных, обеспечение надлежащего уровня конфиденциальности информации, интеграция в существующие системы компетенций, сложность взаимодействия распределенных систем с маломощными узлами интернета вещей, отсутствие надлежащих инструментов управления распределенными системами и, без сомнения, масштабируемость сети. Предложены потенциальные пути и технологии, применимые для решения данных проблем. Ключевые слова-распределенный реестр, технология распределенного реестра, блокчейн, интернет вещей.

Introduction: Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is one of the most significant fields covering various aspects of modern ICT systems. Centralized systems of today can no longer guarantee the required level of availability and reliability, while broadly available distributed ones are still in the infancy. Purpose: Analysis of the applicability of DLT to various industries such as economics, energy, finance, logistics, and the Internet of Things. Results: The article outlines the main challenges of the DLT technology integration, such as the lack of a unified system for data storage, the need to ensure an appropriate level of data confidentiality, integration into the existing competency systems, the issues of а distributed system interaction with resource-constrained IoT devices, the lack of proper management tools for distributed systems, and network scalability. The main contribution of this paper is a systematic overview of the integration challenges followed by potential soluti...

Digital platforms are at the heart of online economic activity, connecting multi-sided markets of producers and consumers of various goods and services. Their market power, in combination with their privileged ecosystem position, raises concerns that they may engage in anti-competitive practices that reduce innovation and consumer welfare. This paper deals with the role of market competition and regulation in addressing these concerns. Traditional (ex-post) antitrust intervention will be less effective in markets driven by network effects unless it is combined with a proper (ex-ante) regulatory framework. Antitrust tools should focus on value creation and its distribution before focusing on competition. The scope of regulatory intervention should satisfy the following three criteria: i) value creation from operation of the platforms does not decrease due to the policy intervention; in particular, interventions should not reduce network effects; ii) allocative efficiency is based on distributing the value created in a fair way among market participants e.g. use of the Shapley Value. Fair and transparent rules must govern the platform ecosystem; iii) dynamic efficiency and competition ensure that incentives for market misconduct and anticompetitive strategies such as artificial entry barriers are eliminated. Market interventions that target a firm's market power should ideally retain value creation while also encouraging small firm entry and innovation. Data has a central role in online markets. Value creation is reinforced through a recursive a data capture and data deployment feedback loop which is enabled by machine learning technologies. A regulatory intervention that facilitates data sharing mechanisms, such that data will not only confer value to market leaders but also to their competitors to the benefit of consumers, is crucial for creating more competitive and innovative digital markets.

Many researchers are concerned about the appropriateness of traditional research approaches and methodologies in the analysis of a digital economy. Using the Experimental Digital Economy (EDE), a new technology infrastructure that we have developed for a digital economy, we propose a new research methodology, a virtual field experiment, which makes it feasible and effective to test research hypotheses with the desired level of experimental controls and to probe successful business strategies in a real business world. Three summaries of research on a digital economy, like the efficiency of a digital market, the effectiveness of digital markets (posted-price markets and auctions), and the impact of quality certifications, address the implications of virtual field experiments.

The objects we consume increasingly exist in digital form, from audiobooks and digital photographs to social media profiles and avatars. Digital objects are often argued to be less valued, personally meaningful, and self-relevant than their physical counterparts and are consequently dismissed as poor candidates for possession. Yet, studies have identified highly meaningful, even irreplaceable, digital possessions. In this article, we account for these contradictory narratives surrounding digital possessions, arguing that digital objects are not inherently unsuited to possession, but rather their affordances may not align with consumers’ imagined affordances (i.e., the object affordances that consumers anticipate). Drawing from a qualitative study of 25 consumers and their digital possessions, we identify three recurring types of affordance misalignment—missing affordances, covert affordances, and deficient affordances—that mediate how consumers and digital objects interact (pragmati...

Social Media has altered the way in which people interact, collaborate and communicate. In particular, social network sites (SNS) have grown tremendously popular and are creating new forms of Web use. The social interactive nature of SNS enables people to share cultural tastes and content across the Web. Cultural goods are hedonic experiential goods and are used in SNS as a means of acquiring and maintaining friendship networks amongst other purposes. Music, in particular, is discussed, shared, and sampled across ...

Given the increasing emphasis on online consumption in our digital era, the current study aimed to explore the avatar-self relationship in association with the concept of product attachment. Through constructing their own avatars and selecting certain virtual possessions for them, participants in the sample were able to represent different elements of their identities to be manifested in their embodied virtual presence. Certain attributes and emotions characterizing both the real as well as the virtual existence of participants appeared to exert important influences. Additional gender differences emerged, in that males were more likely to represent their possible and hidden self-aspects, and focus on the functional meaning of virtual products, while females were more likely to reveal their ideal selves, and attach symbolic meaning to their virtual possessions. For female participants, the role of experimentation emerged as an important construct, with their avatars often reflecting upon their ambivalence toward perceived social norms and societal expectations. Implications for scholars and practitioners are discussed.

The eclipse of Digital Natives and the dawn of virtual culture―how Gen A, Z are radically redefining the future of work, play, economics, and social life.

We’re living through what is arguably one of the most exciting, confusing, and powerful social moments in the history of humanity, the shift from the Digital Age to the Virtual Age. This shift is being driven by technology, and the people who are leading it are the ones who know it best: the Virtual Natives. This book will introduce you to the Virtual Native cohort and mindset, decipher their socio-cultural and economic experiences, and unpack their expectations of companies looking to engage, market, or employ them.

In this book, we explore:

How Virtual Natives are deploying the new technologies driving the virtualized world
How relationships and work habits are being virtualized
Identify ten main Virtual Native-led behaviors that are upending work and culture
How Virtual Natives are evolving their expertise into a full-blown economy

This is nothing short of a cultural revolution. Virtual Natives are the driving force behind a seismic change that is redefining the world through technology and virtual worlds: this book tells you how they are navigating everything from AI to Augmented and virtual reality, gaming, blockchain and Web3 in easy, accessible language.

Cloud Computing is increasingly becoming important in the generation, storage and transmission of information worldwide. In this paper, we discuss the potential of Cloud Computing in terms of how it can strengthen health information systems in developing countries. Like any new technology, Cloud Computing is no silver bullet; it solves certain challenges while bringing new ones to the table. Based on a case study of the innovative use of Cloud Computing for the national health information system in Kenya, we discuss how Cloud Computing can enable the integration and harmonization of fragmented systems and provide real-time information to health managers for evidence based decision making. The key contribution of the paper is to provide an understanding of how Cloud Computing can enhance health management by acting as a catalyst for the integration of health information systems.

Social networking sites have become an important market space in Internet. Social apps existing in social networking sites thrive in the environment provided by them. Companies are focusing more on social networking sites to promote their products and identify new sources of revenue generation. One suchnascent way is by sale of virtual/digital goods through social apps using social networking sites. To the best of our knowledge, research in this area has been growing, with limited studies exploring the business potential involved with purchase of virtual/digital goods. The aim of this paper is to identify the determinants of purchase decision of virtual/digital goods in social apps. We use TAM, social app usage, attributes of virtual/digital goods and other factors to explain the purchase intention of virtual/digital goods in social apps. Survey based methodology has been adopted to show the viability of our research.

Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The problem has been well-studied in the case of limited supply (one copy of each item), and in the case of digital goods (the seller can produce additional copies at no cost). Yet in the case of resources-oil, labor, computing cycles, etc.-neither of these abstractions is just right: additional supplies of these resources can be found, but at increasing difficulty (marginal cost) as resources are depleted. In this work, we initiate the study of the algorithmic mechanism design problem of combinatorial pricing under increasing marginal cost. The goal is to sell these goods to buyers with unknown and arbitrary combinatorial valuation functions to maximize either the social welfare, or the seller's profit; specifically we focus on the setting of posted item prices with buyers arriving online. We give algorithms that achieve constant factor approximations for a class of natural cost functions-linear, low-degree polynomial, logarithmic-and that give logarithmic approximations for arbitrary increasing marginal cost functions (along with a necessary additive loss). We show that these bounds are essentially best possible for these settings.

Purpose Selecting an appropriate theory has always remained a critical task for the digital policy researchers. The literature seems to miss providing theoretical accounts of policy view of the digital platforms governance and offering tools for measuring the effectiveness of policies. To this end, this paper aims to provide a critical review and comparison of dominant information systems (IS) theories used. It highlights the weaknesses of these theories to explain technology features and actor- technology interactions with the rising trend of digital platforms. The main argument of this research is that the policymakers will not have adequate tools for policymaking of digital platforms by following the assumptions of theories used dominantly in the IS field. Design/methodology/approach This paper analyzes the assumptions of dominant IS theories and their applications in the digital policy literature. Then, it shows to what extent these theories are incapable of conceptualizing feat...

Crowdfunding is a fundraising process from a large audience to launch a new venture or entrepreneurial project. It is mostly based on the use of Web and represents a unique category of fundraising, with different vehicles, processes and goals. It is very diffused in the global economic landscape and in Italy where a specific discipline for crowdfunding was introduced for the first time in Europe. The chapter, after a summary of the peculiarities, spread and regulation of crowdfunding, intends to analyze the characteristics of a platform operating on the Italian market (Produzioni dal Basso), highlighting its characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. The work also intends to carry out a simulation for the realization of a crowdfunding project by an Italian Foundation operating in the social sector of child and adolescent distress, to be implemented through the use of the same platform.

The effective management of digital rights is the central challenge in many industries making the transition from physical to digital products. We present a new model that characterizes the value of these digital rights when products are sold both embedded in tangible physical artifacts, and as pure digital goods, and when granting rights permitted by one's digital rights management (DRM) platform may affect the extent of digital piracy. Our model indicates that in the absence of piracy, digital rights should be unrestricted, since a seller can use its pricing strategy to optimally balance sales between physical and digital goods. However, the threat of piracy limits the extent to which digital rights should be granted: the value of digital rights is determined not only by their direct effect on the quality of legal digital goods, but by a differential piracy effect that can lower a seller's pricing power. When the latter effect is sufficiently high, granting digital rights can have a detrimental effect on value-our model indicates that this kind of effect is more likely to be observed for digital rights that aim to replicate the consumption experience of physical goods, rather than enhancing a customer's digital experience. We test the predictions of our analytical model using data from the ebook industry. Our empirical evidence supports our theoretical results, showing that four separate digital rights each have an economically significant impact on ebook prices, and establishing that the digital rights which aim to replicate physical consumption while increasing the threat of piracy are the ones that have negative impact on seller value. We also show that if the pricing of a digital good is keyed off that of an existing tangible good, optimal pricing changes for the former should be more nuanced, rather than simply mirroring changes in the price of the latter, and we discuss the effect of the technological sophistication of potential customers on optimal pricing and rights management. Our results represent new evidence of the importance of an informed and judicious choice of the different digital rights granted by a DRM platform, and provide a new framework for guiding managers in industries that are progressively being digitized.

This paper analyzes optimal pricing for information goods under incomplete information, when both unlimited-usage (fixed-fee) pricing and usage-based pricing are feasible and administering usage-based pricing may involve transaction costs. It is shown that offering fixed-fee pricing in addition to a nonlinear usage-based pricing scheme is always profit improving in the presence of nonzero transaction costs, and there may be markets in which a pure fixed-fee is optimal. This implies that the optimal pricing strategy for information goods is almost never fully revealing. Moreover, it is proved that the optimal usage-based pricing schedule is independent of the value of the fixed fee, a result that simplifies the simultaneous design of pricing schedules considerably and provides a simple procedure for determining the optimal combination of fixed-fee and nonlinear usage-based pricing. The introduction of fixed-fee pricing is shown to increase both consumer surplus and total surplus. The...

Electronic commerce has enabled the use of intelligent agent technologies that can evaluate buyers, customize products, and price in real-time. Our model of an electronic market with customizable products analyzes the pricing, profitability and welfare implications of agent-based technologies that price dynamically based on product preference information revealed by consumers. We find that in making the trade-off between better prices and better customization, consumers invariably choose less-than-ideal products. Furthermore, this trade-off has a higher impact on buyers on the higher end of the market and causes a transfer of consumer surplus towards buyers with a lower willingness to pay. As buyers adjust their product choices in response to better demand agent technologies, seller revenues decrease since the gains from better buyer information are dominated by the lowering of the total value created from the transactions. We study the strategic and welfare implications of these findings, and discuss managerial and technology development guidelines.

The impact of multi-channel technology-enabled digital goods on the sales of the physical counterpart faces uncertainty in the electronic commerce domain. We address the issue empirically by identifying the effect of the availability of digitally-delivered movies on physical DVD movie sales. Unique to our study is our interest in not only purchased digital goods but rented digital goods as well. We construct a robust panel dataset consisting of movie data collected from Amazon and Barnes and Noble on the same day for every movie observed. A key feature of our dataset is the multi-channel availability of digital purchase and digital rental movie formats at Amazon. Our results show that the availability of the digital purchase format does not have a significant effect on DVD sales. Surprisingly, the availability of the digital rental format is associated with a significant reduction in DVD sales. The results imply that a product substitution effect may be occurring between the digital rental and the physical DVD purchase of the same movie. We also conduct robustness tests to show under which conditions the effect is greatest. Our results also provide practical implications to inform strategies regarding movie format release windows.

Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The problem has been well-studied in the case of limited supply (one copy of each item), and in the case of digital goods (the seller can produce additional copies at no cost). Yet in the case of resources-oil, labor, computing cycles, etc.-neither of these abstractions is just right: additional supplies of these resources can be found, but at increasing difficulty (marginal cost) as resources are depleted. In this work, we initiate the study of the algorithmic mechanism design problem of combinatorial pricing under increasing marginal cost. The goal is to sell these goods to buyers with unknown and arbitrary combinatorial valuation functions to maximize either the social welfare, or the seller's profit; specifically we focus on the setting of posted item prices with buyers arriving online. We give algorithms that achieve constant factor approximations for a class of natural cost functions-linear, low-degree polynomial, logarithmic-and that give logarithmic approximations for arbitrary increasing marginal cost functions (along with a necessary additive loss). We show that these bounds are essentially best possible for these settings.

In contexts where fragmentation of information systems is a problem, data warehouse (DW) has brought disparate sources of information together. While bringing data together from multiple health programs and patient record systems, how does one make sense of huge amounts of integrated information? Recent research and industry uses the term, “Operational BI” for decision making tools used in operational activities. In this paper, we highlight the use of DHIS 2, a large-scale, open-source, Health Management Information System (HMIS) that acts as a DW. Firstly, we present the results of a survey done in 13 countries to assess how Operational BI Tools are used. We then show 3 generations of BI Tools in DHIS 2 that have evolved from action-research done over 18 years in more than 30 countries. Secondly, we develop the Overview-Overwhelm (O-O) analytical framework for large-scale systems that need to work with Big Data. The O-O framework combines lessons from DHIS 2 BI Tools design and imp...

The growth in electronic publishing, advancement in e-book reader technology and the advent of the internet has led to the emergence of e-books and a rental market for e-books. When the product is available in both digital and physical form, consumers' willingness to buy is influenced by their preference for the form of the product (physical vs. digital) and their valuation of the product. Books are experience goods and consumers realize the true fit of the book to their tastes only after they have used the book for some time. Renting of e-books provides a sampling opportunity to the consumers. In this paper we examine the pricing and product line design strategies for the retailer through a two stage consumer behavior model. Finally, computational analysis is used to develop additional insights that cannot be obtained analytically. We recommend distinct pricing and renting strategies for underestimated and overestimated books. A key result is that providing an e-book is always optimal, and the retailer's profit increases as the consumers' preference for an e-book increase. We also found that it is not always optimal for a retailer to increase the consumer's initial fit-perception.

We are tackling the problem of trading real-world private information using only cryptographic protocols and a public blockchain to guarantee honest transactions. In this project, we consider three types of agents-buyers, sellers and notaries-interacting in a decentralized privacy-preserving data marketplace (dPDM) such as the Wibson data marketplace. This framework offers infrastructure and financial incentives for individuals to securely sell personal information while preserving personal privacy. Here we provide an efficient cryptographic primitive for the secure exchange of data in a dPDM, which occurs as an atomic operation wherein the data buyer gets access to the data and the data seller gets paid simultaneously.

The purpose of the current paper is to explore the influence of identity on self-extension tendency and virtual consumption in online communities. The importance of material possessions for individual identity has been explored extensively in offline yet only sporadically in online conditions. Data were collected from a group of Second Life residents. Participants rated their virtual identities more favourably than their offline ones across most dimensions. Users characterised with specific identity orientations-such as being more emotional, more anxious and less powerful-were more likely to incorporate digital objects into their self. Additional variation was established by age and gender, yielding results that extend or at times even contradict our understanding derived from offline contexts. Emotion and stability influenced virtual consumption patterns, as manifested in more frequent store visits and greater product variety. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Contemporary virtual worlds provide unique environments in which users may collaborate in the development of shared digital artifacts. However, the ways in which such collaboration takes place is to date under researched. This paper uses an activity theory perspective to analyze the development activities of two communities within the virtual world of Second Life, based on data gathered using ethnographic methods. The study reveals (1) the complimentary and diverging practices utilized by these two different communities of ...

Do firms derive economic returns from business-to-business (B2B) initiatives? How do returns to startup firms compare to those for established firms in B2B initiatives? How do returns to B2B initiatives around digital goods compare to those involving tangible goods? We offer a rigorous definition of B2B then conduct an empirical test of incomplete contract theory to examine the returns to B2B electronic commerce (EC) initiatives focused on digital goods versus tangible goods, and the returns to Internet firms versus brick-and-mortar firms. While there seems to be little difference between digital and tangible initiatives, we find that the returns to Internet firms are significant while the returns to brick-and-mortar firms are not. We propose, based on the application of incomplete contract theory, that this result obtains because the addition of new partners in the EC channel undermines existing relationships in the conventional channel. At the same time, existing relationships in the conventional channel undermine the quality of new relationships in the EC channel. However, Internet firms, with their single channel focus, avoid this difficultly and thus experience significant returns from B2B EC initiatives.

Проведен анализ мирового опыта в создании цифровых платформ и связанных с ними рисков. Всестороннее исследование российского и зарубежного опыта в создании цифровых платформ позволило сформулировать основные требования к таким платформам, определить тенденции их развития. Показано, что внедрение цифровых платформ во всех секторах экономики-естественный ускоряющийся тренд развития современного мира. Отмечено, что быстрое развитие цифровых платформ несет с собой новые риски и угрозы, которые необходимо учитывать и анализировать. Проведенный анализ современного состояния цифровых платформ и доклада о глобальных рисках, подготовленного для Всемирного экономического форума в Давосе, позволил провести идентификацию рассматриваемого вида рисков. На основании проведенной идентификации в работе составлен подробный реестр рисков цифровых платформ. Рассмотрены такие виды цифровых рисков, как риски информационной безопасности, риски организованной киберпреступности, репутационные риски, юридические риски, операционные риски и риски нестабильности доходов участников. На основании полученных данных проведен качественный анализ рисков, связанных с цифровыми платформами. Построена карта рисков цифровых платформ, определены риски, попадающие в зоны пренебрежимого, приемлемого и катастрофического риска. Проведенный анализ позволяет сделать вывод, что наиболее опасные виды цифрового риска, связаны с проблемами безопасности и конфиденциальности данных. Своевременная идентификация и качественный анализ рисков цифровых платформ позволят обеспечить стабильность их функционирования и обеспечить успешную реализацию цифровой трансформации российской экономики.

Reference is increasingly made to 'digital collections', yet this term encompasses accumulated digital objects of varying form, purpose and value. We review social science literature on material collections and draw from in-depth interviews with 20 people in the UK in order to offer a clearer understanding of what constitutes a digital collection and what does not. We develop a taxonomy that presents three distinct types of digital collection and demonstrate ways in which the affordances of digital environments may facilitate or impede meaningful practices of acquisition, curation and exhibition in each case. Through doing so, we present a framework for design in support of collecting practices and the development of more meaningful and valued digital collections.

In contexts where fragmentation of information systems is a problem, data warehouse (DW) has brought disparate sources of information together. While bringing data together from multiple health programs and patient record systems, how does one make sense of huge amounts of integrated information? Recent research and industry uses the term, “Operational BI” for decision making tools used in operational activities. In this paper, we highlight the use of DHIS 2, a large-scale, open-source, Health Management Information System (HMIS) that acts as a DW. Firstly, we present the results of a survey done in 13 countries to assess how Operational BI Tools are used. We then show 3 generations of BI Tools in DHIS 2 that have evolved from action-research done over 18 years in more than 30 countries. Secondly, we develop the Overview-Overwhelm (O-O) analytical framework for large-scale systems that need to work with Big Data. The O-O framework combines lessons from DHIS 2 BI Tools design and imp...

Every day more and more companies rely on artificial intelligence, from small startups to large companies, among which stand out not only the IT giants Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, but even those that seemingly far from this topic - for example, General Motors and Boeing created a joint laboratory for AI research. It becomes obvious that AI technology is the real mainstream of our time. The article examines the global market for artificial intelligence systems and technologies. The authors described the peculiarities of the formation of this market and the main trends and segments in its development. The goal of research - identify the dynamics, features and trends of the global market for artificial intelligence systems and technologies. The methodology of system analysis, the dialectical method of scientific cognition, methods of historical, logical and comparative analysis are used. The concept of artificial intelligence has been systematized, the dynamics of the global mark...