CAREER: Identifying and Measuring the Economic Value of Information on the Internet

该项目的目标是帮助理解新型在线信息内容的经济影响，衡量其价值，并帮助教育下一代商业和技术专业人士。今天互联网的一个重要用途是为消费者和企业提供一个平台来传播关于他们自己和产品的信息。事实上，大量的信息正在产生，因为在线市场也促进了在线社区和社交网络的创建。许多文本内容具有具体的经济价值，这些价值通常被嵌入其中。虽然在线市场上发布的信息有几种，但该项目将分析三种重要且相互关联的信息类别：(i)在互联网上无处不在的文本反馈的经济价值，如电子市场的声誉系统、在线社区的产品评论、二手商品市场和社交网络中的产品描述；（ii）用户在数字市场互动中披露的地理位置和其他自我描述信息等社会信息的经济价值；（三）信息消费的经济成本，如消费者搜索和修改信息的成本，以及对文本信息进行处理的成本。通过测量“在线文本信息的经济价值”，这项研究将超越分析之前工作中所做的数字信息。通过产生衡量用户生成的在线内容价值的新方法，研究活动将为从业者提供可操作的建议，以改进电子市场反馈系统的设计，并帮助公司在社交购物网络中有效地展示信息。这个研究项目可以对“数字鸿沟”和服务不足社区的辩论产生重要影响，因为它将为地理位置如何影响经济和社会行为提供新的见解。最后，明确理解用户在互联网使用过程中产生的各种成本的大小，将有助于制定政策，为所有参与者带来更大的社会和经济效益。通过借鉴多种方法，如实证分析、分析建模、统计、实验方法和文本挖掘，该项目将推进当前跨学科工作的方法。这些教育活动将产生一个针对本科生和研究生的新的指导计划，一个名为“电子市场和数字内容”的斯特恩商学院本科商业项目的新课程开发，以及一个新的博士研讨会，该研讨会将介绍衡量在线内容经济价值的新技术。此外，这项计划所产生的数据集和教育练习将提供给学术界，以进一步传播计划中的研究和教学进展。

The goal of this project is to contribute to an understanding of the economic impact of new kinds of online information content, measuring their value and helping educate the next generation of business and technology professionals. An important use of the Internet today is in providing a platform for consumers and firms to disseminate information about themselves as well as about products. Indeed, a large amount of information is being generated as online markets also facilitate the creation of online communities and social networks. Much of that textual content has concrete economic value that is often embedded in it. While there are several kinds of information published in online markets, the project will analyze three important and interrelated categories of information: (i) the economic value of textual feedback that is ubiquitous on the Internet such as in reputation systems in electronic markets, product reviews in online communities, and product descriptions in used good markets and social networks, (ii) the economic value of social information such as geographical locations and other self-descriptive information disclosed by users during interactions in digital markets, and (iii) the economic cost of information consumption such as costs of searching and modifying information as well as the costs of processing textual information incurred by consumers. By measuring the "economic value of online textual information," this research will go beyond analyzing the numeric information that has been done in prior work. By producing novel ways of measuring the value of user generated online content, the research activities will make actionable recommendations to practitioners to improve the design of feedback systems in electronic markets as well as help firms display information efficiently in social shopping networks. This research program can have important implications for the debate on the "digital divide," and underserved communities, because it will offer new insights into how geographical locations affect economic and social behavior. Finally, an explicit understanding of the magnitude of various kinds of costs incurred by users during Internet usage will contribute to policies that lead to greater social and economic benefits for all participants. By drawing on multiple methodologies such as empirical analysis, analytical modeling, statistics, experimental methods and text mining, this project will advance current methodologies for interdisciplinary work. The educational activities will result in a new mentoring program for Undergraduate and Graduate students, a new course development titled "Electronic Markets and Digital Content" at Stern's Undergraduate Business program and a new Ph.D. seminar that will introduce new techniques for measuring economic value of online content. Further, the datasets and educational exercises resulting from this project will be made available to the academic community to further disseminate the planned research and teaching advances.