
How much do we need to get paid to give up FB and other online services? (PDF) - yarapavan
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J0efyxc9nlyBjLFnMi_ykYO6kx5MpMAq/view?usp=drivesdk
======
yarapavan
NBER working paper at
[http://www.nber.org/papers/w24514](http://www.nber.org/papers/w24514)

Abstract:

GDP and derived metrics (e.g., productivity) have been central to
understanding economic progress and well-being. In principle, the change in
consumer surplus (compensating expenditure) provides a superior, and more
direct, measure of the change in well-being, especially for digital goods, but
in practice, it has been difficult to measure. We explore the potential of
massive online choice experiments to measure consumers’ willingness to accept
compensation for losing access to various digital goods and thereby estimate
the consumer surplus generated from these goods. We test the robustness of the
approach and benchmark it against established methods, including incentive
compatible choice experiments that require participants to give up Facebook
for a certain period in exchange for compensation. The proposed choice
experiments show convergent validity and are massively scalable. Our results
indicate that digital goods have created large gains in well-being that are
missed by conventional measures of GDP and productivity. By periodically
querying a large, representative sample of goods and services, including those
which are not priced in existing markets, changes in consumer surplus and
other new measures of well-being derived from these online choice experiments
have the potential for providing cost-effective supplements to existing
national income and product accounts.

