Free Digital Products and Aggregate Economic Measurement

Produits numériques gratuits et mesures agrégées de l’activité économique

Diane Coyle and David Nguyen
Additional contact information
David Nguyen: Stanford University

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The widespread use of free digital services such as online search and social media raises the question of how to measure the economic activity and welfare provided by zero price digital products. Among the possible approaches, the so‑called stated preference method directly questions consumers about the value they place on these products. Through three large representative UK surveys before and during COVID‑19 lockdowns, we ascertain consumers' stated willingness to accept the loss of a range of ‘free' online and offline products, and some paid substitutes. The average stated value for free products is generally high, with clear rankings among products, while the natural experiment of the lockdown brought about changes in stated values that were often significant and of plausible sign and scale. The stated preference method therefore provides useful insights. However, there are limitations in using it to estimate aggregate economic welfare, including the absence of a budget constraint

Keywords: digital; free products; stated preference; economic welfare; bien-être économique; préférence déclarée; produits gratuits; numérique (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://insee.hal.science/hal-05201920v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, 2023, 539, pp.27 - 50. ⟨10.24187/ecostat.2023.539.2096⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://insee.hal.science/hal-05201920v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Free Digital Products and Aggregate Economic Measurement (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05201920

DOI: 10.24187/ecostat.2023.539.2096

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().