Gaming Structure

For several years, commentators have forecast that the rise in smartphones and tablets, as well as Facebook, would upend the structure of the gaming market. A variety of novel adroit aliens and irascible animals symbolically represent the new order, while new companies from new genres alter the identities of suppliers. 

Methinks that all the talk of restructuring is exaggerated. The names have changed, but the same factors still matter for market leadership. The old structure had a number of economic determinants that haven’t gone away. For example, ongoing product development by independent firms continues apace, and all parties must manage the unknowable. Today, as in the past, independent firms cooperate with established publishers when it suits both parties.

If you ask me, we’re transitioning to the same structure with (at most) a new set of players. That’s because two factors used to matter most in gaming—uncertainty and market frictions—and they still do.

A Big Payoff

Google and Apple are two of the most profitable companies on the globe today. They seem to share little in common except that achievement. They took very different paths to the stratosphere.

Google, after all, is less than a decade and a half old, a child of the web with a successful approach to advertising, built around a search engine and many services to enhance the user’s experience. Apple is more than twice as old. Its original product, personal computers, makes up a fraction of its sales today, while its future profitability lies with a mix of software in iTunes and new hardware introduced in the last decade—namely, phones, tablets, and portable music devices.

What economic insight emerges from setting these two firms next to one another? A brief discussion of both of their businesses will reveal something trite and something deep. The trite part is this: Some settings produce lots of market value, and some firms capture large parts of that value, but those rarely happen together. The deep part forms the key insight today: these examples are fabulously profitable because they are unique.

The grocery scanner and barcode economy

Think about the world of bar codes and scanners. What was life like before their invention? This post offers an appreciation for this staple of modern retail life.

Give the barcode its due. The widespread deployment of barcodes and scanners reduces the costs of keeping accurate and timely inventories. It happened quietly in the last few decades and had numerous consequences.

Think about it. The number of products on the shelf of a typical retail store has increased by tens of thousands. The accuracy of cashiers has increased tremendously because the cashiers do not have to pause to read the price tag. Firms keep better inventory so the frequency of stock-outs — missing items — also has declined.

More to the point, all of that happened because somebody took the time to develop the bar code. Somebody made effort to get everyone in the industry to invent the equipment to take advantage of barcodes.

Among the influential people in that effort was a fellow named Alan Haberman. He passed away last week.

I never knew the man, so I cannot wax eloquent about his life. But I know something about bar codes, as well as the economics of value built around such symbols. Modern life could not exist without them. That is why this post is not a eulogy. It is an appreciation.

It would be an exaggeration to say that barcodes set me on my life’s intellectual path, but they were an influential example when I was a fledgeling and impressionable scholar. The bar code was one of the three canonical examples of the new era unfolding before us in the 1980s, a world of new standardization and increased interoperability. (VCRs and PCs were the other two). Those three examples, as well as a few others, did motivate my interest in the economics of this phenomenon. As readers of this space know, I have stayed here because new examples arise all the time, and in such diverse areas as WiFi, travel intermediaries, the MP3 player, smart phone, and in many places online.

Alright, maybe I am (a little) nuts, but read on.

In appreciation to Haberman’s life’s work, this is an opportunity to wax on a bit about the joys of the scanner economy. Once you begin to recognize the economics of bar codes, you realize that these economics are everywhere.  I hope you find this interesting, illuminating, and a little amusing.

The Direction of Broadband Spillovers

Revenue for US Internet access more than doubled during the first decade of the millennium owing to some simple arithmetic: the number of households using the Internet increased, and prices for broadband access averaged twice those of dial-up. More concretely, in the summer of 2000, while 37.1 percent of US households connected with dial-up, only 4.4 percent had broadband. By October 2009, 63.5 percent of US households connected with broadband.

The upgrade to broadband initially led most US households to spend more time online. At first, much of that new time went into the same activity found in dial-up (for example, checking e-mail, reading news, and shopping). Only gradually did users add activities that dial-up couldn’t handle (such as watching YouTube video, downloading music, or reading many blogs). By now, the transformation is rather apparent: broadband has created more online users and, moreover, these users are more valuable users of electronic commerce and advertising-supported media.

The relationship between broadband’s growth and other online markets is what economists call a growth spillover—that is, growth in one market spilled into another. Spillovers can be negative or positive. For example, broadband’s diffusion produced negative spillovers for the printed magazine and newspaper business, and it produced a positive spillover for online video sharing, such as YouTube.

Spillovers don’t need to be confined to a geographically local area, so they’re often challenging to observe and trace. This column focuses on understanding the geographic direction of the positive spillovers from broadband to online retailers and advertising-supported media, about which we know very little. To whom did the positive gains flow, and where?

The Internet and Wage Inequality

What has the Internet Done for the Economy?

The puzzling spread of the commercial Internet could explain wage inequalities

It is hard to overstate how much the business world relies on the Internet. Powerhouse retailers like Target and Wal-Mart can simultaneously manage their changing inventories, warehouses, distribution routes, and sales. FedEx and UPS can code every shipment online so that customers can find out exactly where their packages are and what time they will arrive at their doors. Buying a wedding gift? Just pull up the couple’s online registry and browse the items that have not been purchased yet. Shopping for insurance? You can get quotes quickly via secure online chats with company representatives.

None of that was possible before 1995, when the large, government-controlled networks somewhat begrudgingly opened their lines for commercial use. Advanced Internet technologies spread rapidly in businesses across the country—in small cities, sprawling suburbs, and dense urban hubs. Although this sparked wage and employment spurts everywhere, the gains were far more striking in regions that were already well off, according to a study to appear in the American Economic Review….To read more, click here.

Kellogg Insight provides summary of research articles. This is a summary of “The Internet and Local Wages: A Puzzle,” by Avi Goldfarb, Chris Forman and Shane Greenstein. For more about this topic on this blog see “Will the iPad Flatten us all?”

Digital Dark Matter

Astrophysicists draw on the term “dark matter” to describe the unseen parts of the universe. Many symptoms, such as the rotational speed of galaxies and gravitational effects, indicate the presence of dark matter. Yet, our present science lacks the appropriate concepts and tools for measuring directly what we only see indirectly today.

Economists need a similar label for some important building blocks of the digital economy that we do not measure using standard tools. Many indirect symptoms indicate their growth and importance. Many labels have been proposed—invisible infrastructure and private provision of public goods, for example. These labels capture a grain of truth, and, yet, miss something, too.

Let’s just call it “digital dark matter” and review what we know.

Will the iPad flatten us all?

This article appeared in the Financial Times on January 14, 2011. It was written by Gillian Tett (pictured on the right, photo credit to the Financial Times). It refers to research by yours truly, Chris Forman and Avi Goldfarb. The specific paper she discusses is titled “The Internet and Local Wages: a Puzzle.” Check it out.

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Will the iPad flatten us all?

As you trudged back to work this month, did you head to an office in a large urban centre, be that Baltimore, Bristol or somewhere else? Or did you sit down at your computer – or with an iPad – in a pleasant ski lodge, beach house or even a simple house in a poorer rural region, such as Arkansas or Wales?

Right now those questions matter not just for your own well-being, but to wider social and economic policy, too. More than a decade ago, the US author Thomas Friedman caused a stir by suggesting that the internet was turning the world “flat”: by connecting everyone, new technologies were creating competition and opportunities across borders, enabling many jobs to migrate….

The broadband price index puzzle

Does a consumer price index for broadband differ much from a producer price index for broadband? Though this question sounds like the final exam question for a real boring graduate class in economic measurement, I urge you to stay with me. There is something puzzling here about measuring innovation. Resolving that puzzle reveals something fundamental about broadband in particular, and about measuring innovation in general.

First, the answer. Why, yes, as a matter of fact, the two indexes can differ, but rarely do. Broadband’s experience in the last decade is an example where they do.

How can that be? How can the consumer and producer price index measure a different rate of improvement for the same phenomenon? They are based on different concepts. While those different concepts do not have to lead to different numerical answers, in broadband’s case they do. That is because a consumer price index ignores much technical improvement (more below), while a producer price index does not necessarily.  The details and reasons expose some puzzling principles for measuring technical change — arguably, explaining why our society undervalues economic improvements in broadband.

(There. Now you know how to get an A on this exam question.)

Indeed, I confess that this post is motivated by all the email I have received recently about a price index I helped make for broadband.  The email asks the same question: “How can a consumer price index for broadband possibly find little movement? Hasn’t there been a lot of innovation?” Well, let’s dive in and find out.

Digitization and Value Creation

Often, the simplest economic questions are the hardest to answer. Consider these: How much economic value did the massive decline in the cost of digitization in the last two decades create? And, would a similar level of decline in the next decade create the same amount of value?

These are surprisingly difficult questions to answer. Do not get me wrong. Obviously, large cost declines create new value. How much value? We can look deeply at the past but still find it hard to answer that question with any precision. Many factors enhance or limit the extent of value created. If we cannot analyze the past, surely predicting the future is fraught with challenges.

Bleeding Edge Mass Market Standards

To have a large impact, bleeding-edge mass market standards must do two things: diffuse widely and provide new functionality. Curiously, however, while these standards often get built from very advanced technologies, they cannot deploy on a wide scale without building upon other widely deployed routines or less-advanced processes.

Successful deployment of a bleeding-edge mass market standard can bring about enormous change. Consider what happened after the design of USB2 became available. Interested parties monitored the upgrade to USB, understanding that their near rivals did the same. All these parties subsequently made products compatible with USB2 and differentiated along the dimensions in which they had competitive advantage. Consequently, a range of innovative products emerged—storage devices, printers, cameras, keyboards, … you name it.

There is something paradoxical about this pattern: A standard at one layer enables more novelty on another. And a change to the standard—upon which many others build—can enable an even wider range of innovative services.

This issue’s column discusses the determination of new standards in mass markets, an event that shapes such paradoxical outcomes and hence market structure and firm strategy. It is worthwhile to take a moment and examine the patterns.