GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods in the Digital Economy
By E. Brynjolfsson, A. Collis, W. Diewert, Felix Eggers, Kevin J. Fox. 2019
93 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The welfare contributions of the digital economy, characterized by the proliferation of new and free goods, are not well-measured in our current national accounts. We derive explicit terms for the welfare contributions of these goods and introduce a new metric, GDP-B which quantifies their benefits, rather than costs. We apply this framework to several empirical examples including Facebook and smartphone cameras and estimate their valuations through incentive-compatible choice experiments. For example, including the welfare gains from Facebook would have added between 0.05 and 0.11 percentage points to GDP-B growth per year in the US.
Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations
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Citations in the corpus
- Causality for Machine Learning (2019, background): “A purely digital good can be copied at essentially zero cost (Brynjolfsson et al., 2019), unless we move into the quantum world (Wootters and Zurek, 1982).”