Owen Rust

Platform Governance and Private Regulation

Why do many social media sites have rules about what sort of content users can and cannot post? Economically, there are strong incentives for popular websites to self-police the content that gets posted. Free speech is popular politically, but not with all consumers!

Subscription Fatigue and Two-Part Tariffs in the Digital Economy

Today, streaming subscribers are discovering that they must pay additional fees to access premium content. A look at how two-part tariffs are affecting consumers and what might occur in the digital market for entertainment and premium content.

Attention as an Economic Resource

A generation ago, technological advancements were seen as automatic productivity boosters. Today, many such advancements distract workers through easily-accessible entertainment. Attention must now be seen as a scarce factor of production.

Algorithmic Collusion Without Communication

Tomorrow, will the stores you frequent be using AI modeling to set their pricing and production figures? AI models are doing that right now, and may come to engage in "collusion" by independently concluding that higher prices and lower output leads to greater profits.

Dark Patterns and the Economics of Consumer Mistakes

Almost all of us have experienced websites using various strategies and gimmicks to urge us to buy more stuff. This is known as the use of dark patterns to take advantage of human psychology. What are the economic ramification of widespread ecommerce use of dark patterns?

Compute Constraints and the New Economics of Scarcity in AI

AI is here and creating wonders, but it's not expanding as rapidly as many first predicted. The reason is significant cost and supply constraints, limiting AI data centers to only a handful of large firms. What are the economic implications of this AI bottleneck?

Attention Markets and the Economics of Time Scarcity

Firms have only limited human attention spans to advertise to, creating attention markets that lead to rising advertising costs. As platforms capture more consumers' attention, what are the economic effects of potential monopolies on this attention?

Data Portability and Competition Policy in Digital Markets

As consumers, we generate tons of usage data on our electronic devices, ranging from navigation info to entertainment preferences to files to images. When we buy new products from different providers, does our digital data transfer easily from the old products? A look a data portability:

Remote Work and the Geography of Wages

In 2020, millions of white collar workers went remote and fled urban centers for lower-cost towns and suburbs. How has the geography of wages evolved in the six years since the remote work revolution began...and begun to fade?

Data as Capital: Rethinking the Factors of Production

In the past quarter-century, digital data has become a new factor of production, allowing firms to create new products, communicate with suppliers and retailers, and advertise to customers. How does data affect firms' value, and how will it affect macro-level economic growth?

AI Price Discrimination and the End of the “Uniform Price”

Sellers have long wished to be able to charge higher prices to customers who are willing and able to pay more. Now, with AI software, sellers may finally have the ability to quickly and accurately analyze customers' willingness to pay. Is this ethical?

Algorithmic Hiring and the New Labor Market Matching Function

When you see a job you want, are you using AI to optimize your online application, resume, and cover letter? Do you know whether your words will pass through the hiring managers' filters, or be automatically deleted? A look at the effect of AI on today's hiring markets.

Digital Payments and the Vanishing Role of Cash

Today, most consumers rarely use cash at all and rely solely on credit cards, debit cards, or digital payment apps on their smartphones. What are the economic implications of becoming a cashless society?

Platform Ratings as Informal Regulation

Today, consumers can get tremendous volumes of information about the products they want to buy, thanks to online reviews. Could customer reviews reduce the need for government regulation? What are the economic effects of the myriad of online reviews out there for every good and service?

Subscription Economies and the Rebundling of Consumer Demand

Over the past two decades, our electronic entertainment has evolved from individual unit purchases to monthly streaming subscriptions. Why has this system evolved, and will it remain popular for the next two decades?

The Economics of Hyper-Personalization: When Every Consumer Gets a Different Price

One fear regarding artificial intelligence (AI) is its potential ability to analyze and profile customers to allow sellers to engage in perfect price discrimination: charging each customer the maximum amount he or she is willing to pay. What would be the economic ramifications?

The Geography of Remote Work: Are Cities Losing Their Agglomeration Advantage?

With high speed Internet, many white collar workers can work from anywhere. Does this ability to work for a big city firm from a town thousands of miles away weaken the agglomeration advantage traditionally enjoyed by big cities?

The Economics of Micro-Influencers: Reputation, Pricing, and Market Structure

Why have many companies shifted from producing expensive commercials and ads featuring scripted celebrities to unscripted social media videos by influencers? A look at the return-on-investment (ROI) of influencer advertising.

The Economics of Identity Verification: When KYC Becomes Infrastructure

With terabytes of our personal data online, most consumers want to feel that the countless online companies they frequent will keep it safe from hackers, scammers, and fraudsters. What are the economics behind "Know Your Customer", or KYC, policies?

AI Supply Chains: When Compute Becomes the New Oil

As consumers and firms rapidly demand more AI processing and data storage, will computing power become the new fought-over resource, similar to oil in the 1970s? A look at the challenges facing the cloud computing industry.

AI Tutors, Inequality, and the New Education Production Function

Some proponents of AI argue that it will help level the educational playing field between rich and poor students, giving those with lower income the ability to compete academically. But will AI, like previous ed tech innovations, fall prey to the Matthew effect?

The Economics of AI Hallucinations: Information Quality as a Market Good

Many of us love to use AI programs, from ChatGPT to Grok to Google Gemini, to give us answers to complex questions in simple, common language. But are we risking financial and economic inefficiency due to AI errors? Will consumers demand that their AI answers be human-verified?

The Economics of Digital Twins and Predictive Maintenance

Large companies may be spending billions of dollars a year in inefficient maintenance on their capital goods, either doing too much maintenance and wasting money or not enough maintenance and dealing with equipment failure. Can digital twins and AI end this inefficiency?

The Economics of Deepfake Detection: Trust, Verification, and Information Markets

As AI makes fake news and misinformation harder and harder to detect, will consumers and producers begin paying for verification and certification of authenticity? Should governments get involved to re-establish trust in information to soothe roiling markets?

The Rebundling of Higher Education: Platforms, Credentials, and Market Signaling

Since the Great Recession, university education has become increasingly expensive...while degrees hold less and less of a premium in the labor market. Will MOOCs and microcredentials come to replace four-year degrees?