Readings
Many of the assigned readings are
licensed by the UC Berkeley Library, and can be accessed
from a computer with a campus IP address. You can also
access these materials from off-campus by using the
library's proxy server.
Reading assignments may be adjusted
throughout the course of the semester.
1. Economics
of information goods, services, and platforms
Required:
- Miller, E. Golden
Footballs and the Economics of Groupon, May 2009.
- McAfee, P., Introduction
to Economic Analysis. Section 4.1.8 on "Economies
of Scale and Scope". [The electronic version of this
book is free. It serves as a good microeconomics
reference at the introductory/intermediate level.]
- Shapiro, C. and Varian, H. Network
Effects, Notes to accompany Information Rules: A
Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, Harvard
Business School Press, 1998.
- Briscoe, B., Odlyzko, A., and Tilly, B. Metcalfe's
Law is Wrong. IEEE
Spectrum, July 2006, pp. 26-31.
Optional:
- Luenberger, D., Markets,
Chapter 7 of Information Science,
Princeton University Press, 2006. [Intro/refresher of
basic microeconomics concepts]
- John Perry Barlow, The
Economy of Ideas, Wired 2.03, 1994. [Visionary of his
time.]
- Sundararajan, A. Network
Effects, part of the Industrial Organization of
Information Technology Industries web site.
- Varian, H., Section 6 "Switching costs and lock-in" in
Economics
of
Information Technology. Mattioli Lecture at
Bocconi University, Milan, Italy, 2001.
2.1 Business strategy: differential pricing
Required:
Optional:
2.2 Business strategy: versioning, bundling
Required:
- Shapiro, C. and Varian, H., Versioning:
The
Smart
Way to Sell Information, Harvard Busines
Review,
1998.
- Bakos and Brynjolfsson, Aggregation
and Disaggregation of Information Goods: Implications
for Bundling, Site Licensing and Micropayment Systems,
in Varian and Kahin, Eds. Internet Publishing and Beyond: The Economics
of Digital Information and Intellectual Property,
MIT Press, 2000.
Optional:
2.3 Business strategy: pricing at zero, price
conditioning
Required:
- Anderson, C., Economics
of
free: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. Wired 02.25.08.
- Gladwell, M., Priced
to Sell: Is Free the Future?, The New Yorker,
July 6, 2009.
- Loveman, G., Diamonds
in the Data Mine, Harvard Business Review, 2003.
- Acquisti, A., Varian, H., Conditioning
Prices
on Purchase History, Marketing Science 24:3, 367-381, 2005.
Optional:
2.4 Business strategy: competition
Readings:
Optional:
- McAfee, P., Introduction
to Economic Analysis. Section 7.2 on "Cournot
Oligopoly".
- Tirole, J. The
Theory of Industrial Organization. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1988, Chapter 5 "Short-Run Price
Competition", pp. 133-152. ISBN: 9780262200714.
2.5 Business strategy: complements
Required:
2.6 Business strategy: platforms and two-sided
markets
Required:
- Cusumano, M., Technology
Strategy
and Management: The Puzzle of Apple, Communications of the ACM,
September 2008.
- Milian, M., Some
game developers unhappy with Apple, Nintendo, CNN,
March 4, 2011.
- Carmody, T., Sidestepping
Apple: From Amazon to Condé Nast, Companies
Rethink App Strategies, Wired, July 25, 2011.
- Eisenmann, T., Parker, G., Van Alstyne, M., Strategies
for
Two-Sided Markets, Harvard Business Review, 2006.
- Eisenmann, T., Parker, G., Van Alstyne, M., Platform
Envelopment, Strategic
Management Journal, 2011.
Optional:
3.1 Industry structure: loci of competition, market
power
Required:
Optional:
3.2 Industry structure: vertical control, network
neutrality
Required:
- U.S. Department of Justice, Non-Horizontal
Merger Guidelines, June 14, 1984.
- Peha, J., The
Benefits
and Risks of Mandating Network Neutrality, and the
Quest for a Balanced Policy. Telecommunications
Policy Research Conference (TPRC) 2006.
- Peter Eckersley, Fred von Lohmann and Seth Schoen, Packet
Forgery
By ISPs: A Report on the Comcast Affair,
Electronic Frontier Foundation Whitepaper, Nov 2007.
Optional:
- A. Odlyzko. Network
Neutrality, Search Neutrality, and the Never-ending
Conflict between Efficiency and Fairness in Markets,
Review of Network
Economics, March 2009.
- A. Odlyzko. The
delusions
of net neutrality, Telecommunications Policy
Research Conference, Sep 2008.
- Tim Wu, Network
Neutrality,
Broadband Discrimination, Journal of Telecommunications
and High Technology Law, Vol. 2, p. 141, 2003.
- Papers from the Telecommunications
Policy
Research Conference (TPRC).
4. Economics of information: value of
information, information asymmetry
Required:
Optional:
- Berger, J. O., Statistical
decision theory, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.
Second Edition. Eds. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E.
Blume. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
- Eeckhoudt, L., Godfroid, P., Risk
Aversion and the Value of Information, Journal of Economic
Education, 2000.
- Feldman, Chuang, Stoica,
Shenker, Hidden
action
in network routing. IEEE Journal for Selected Areas in
Communications, 2007.
5. Power law, long tail, search, and recommendation
Required:
- Anderson, C., The
Long Tail, Wired
12.10, Oct 2004.
- Brynjolfsson, E., Hu, Y. J., Smith, M. D., From
Niches to Riches: The Anatomy of the Long Tail. Sloan Management Review,
47(4) 67-71, 2006.
- M. Cha, H. Kwak, P. Rodriguez, Y.-Y. Ahn, and S. Moon.
I
Tube, You Tube, Everybody Tubes: Analyzing the World’s
Largest User Generated Content Video System.
Proceedings of ACM Internet Measurement Conference,
2007.
Optional:
- Easley, D. and Kleinberg, J. Networks,
Crowds, and Markets. Reasoning about a Highly
Connected World. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Chapter 18, "Power Laws and Rich-Get-Richer Phenomena".
- Adamic, L., Zipf,
Power-laws, and Pareto - a ranking tutorial, 2000.
- Gabaix, Xavier. "power
laws." The New
Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Second
Edition. Eds. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
- Mitzenmacher, M., A
brief history of generative models for power law and
lognormal distributions, Internet Mathematics, 1:226-251, 2003.
- Brynjolfsson, E., Hu, Y. J., Simester, D., Goodbye
Pareto
Principle, Hello Long Tail: The Effect of Search Costs
on the Concentration of Product Sales , MIT Center
for Digital Business Working Paper, (December 2006).
- Brynjolfsson, E., Hu, Y. J., Smith, M. D., Consumer
Surplus
in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of
Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers, Management Science,
2003.
6. Network cascades and viral marketing
Required:
Optional:
- Salganik, M.,
Dodds, P., Watts, D., Experimental
Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an
Artificial Cultural Market, Science, Feb 2006.
- Easley, D. and Kleinberg, J. Networks,
Crowds, and Markets. Reasoning about a Highly
Connected World. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Chapter 16, "Information Cascades".
- Easley, D. and Kleinberg, J. Networks,
Crowds, and Markets. Reasoning about a Highly
Connected World. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Chapter 21, "Epidemics".
- Szabo, G. and Huberman, B., Predicting the popularity of online content,
Communications of the
ACM, August 2010.
- Joseph, Shetty, Chuang, Stoica, Modeling
the
Adoption of New Network Architectures, ACM CoNEXT,
2007.
- Sinan Aral, Lev Muchnika, and Arun Sundararajan,
Distinguishing influence-based contagion from
homophily-driven diffusion in dynamic networks.
PNAS, 2009.
7. Network formation and network structure
Required:
- Jackson, Matthew O. "network
formation." The
New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Second
Edition. Eds. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Optional:
- Easley, D. and
Kleinberg, J. Networks,
Crowds, and Markets. Reasoning about a Highly
Connected World. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Chapter 1, "Graphs".
- Easley, D. and Kleinberg, J. Networks,
Crowds, and Markets. Reasoning about a Highly
Connected World. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Chapter 13, "The Structure of the Web".
- Easley, D. and Kleinberg, J. Networks,
Crowds, and Markets. Reasoning about a Highly
Connected World. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Chapter 20, "The Small World Phenomenon".
- Fabrikant, Luthra, Maneva, Papadimitriou, Shenker, On a Network
Creation Game, ACM Symposium on Principles of
Distributed Computing, 2003
- Byung-Gon Chun, Rodrigo Fonseca, Ion Stoica and John
Kubiatowicz, Characterizing
Selfishly Constructed Overlay Routing Networks,
IEEE INFOCOM'2004, March, 2004.
8. Peer production, crowdsourcing, human computation:
incentives, coordination
Required:
Optional:
- Axelrod, R. and Hamilton, W., The
Evolution of Cooperation, Science,
211(4489):1390-6, 1981.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation
- Nowak and Sigmund, Evolution
of indirect reciprocity by image scoring, Nature 393, 573
- 577 (11 June 1998)
http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/31225
http://www.ped.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/publications_nowak/Nature98.pdf
- Resnick, Paul, Zeckhauser, Richard, Friedman, Eric,
and Kuwabara, Ko. Reputation
Systems. Communications
of the ACM, 43(12), December 20000, pages
45-48.
- Chrysanthos Dellarocas, The
Digitization
of Word of Mouth: Promise and Challenges of Online
Feedback Mechanisms, Management Science, 2003.
- Cohen, B. Incentives
build
Robustness in BitTorrent. Workshop on Economics of
Peer-to-Peer Systems (P2PEcon), Berkeley CA, 2003.
- M. Feldman, K. Lai, I. Stoica, and J. Chuang, Robust
Incentive Techniques for Peer-to-Peer Networks.
Proceedings of 5th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
(EC'04), New York NY, May 2004.
- M. Feldman, C. Papadimitriou, J. Chuang, and I.
Stoica, Free-Riding
and
Whitewashing in Peer-to-Peer Systems. IEEE
Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol.
24, No. 5, May 2006.
- M. Babaioff, J. Chuang, M. Feldman. Incentives in
Peer-to-Peer Systems, Chapter 23 of N. Nisan, T.
Roughgarden, E. Tardos, V. Vazirani, eds., Algorithmic
Game
Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Galen Pickard, Iyad Rahwan, Wei Pan, Manuel Cebrian,
Riley Crane, Anmol Madan, Alex Pentland, Time Critical
Social Mobilization: The DARPA Network Challenge
Winning Strategy, 2010.
- Tang et al., Reflecting
on the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge, Communications of the ACM,, 2011.
- Wolfers, Justin and Eric Zitzewitz. "prediction
markets." The
New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Second
Edition. Eds. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
9. Interdependency and information security
Required:
Optional:
- Hal Varian, System
Reliability
and Free-Riding, In Economics of Information Security,
Camp, L. Jean; Lewis, Stephen (Eds.), Springer 2004.
- Anderson, R., Why
Information Security is Hard: An Economic Perspective,
17th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference,
December 10-14, 2001
- Alessandro Acquisti and Jens Grossklags, What
Can
Behavioral Economics Teach Us About Privacy?. In
Alessandro Acquisti, Sabrina De Capitani di Vimercati,
Stefanos Gritzalis, Costas Lambrinoudakis (eds), Digital
Privacy: Theory, Technologies and Practices, Auerbach
Publications, 363-377, 2007.
- Papers from the workshop series Workshop
on Economics and Information Security (WEIS).
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