Collaborative Research: An Empirical Study of Broadband Internet Service

协作研究：宽带互联网服务的实证研究

• 批准号: 1324717
• 负责人: Jonathan Williams
• 金额: $ 35.03万
• 依托单位: University of Georgia Research Foundation Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-09-15 至 2015-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1324717&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Empirical; Study; Broadband

Broadband internet access is now widespread; there about 210 million users in the United States, up from roughly eight million in 2000. These users spend an average of 30 hours a month using the Internet, up from just one hour per month in 1995. Surprisingly little is known about the fundamentals of demand for internet access, such as the willingness-to-pay per gigabyte of data or the importance of externalities created by network congestions. A key reason for this gap is the lack of detailed data on broadband useage.This project studies pricing and usage of broadband service using a unique data set of subscriber-level service plans and hourly usage from a group of North American internet service providers. The research team will produce descriptive statistics on broadband usage, estimate demand and willingness-to-pay for broadband access, evaluation the welfare implications of usage based pricing, and analyze the impact of network congestion on demand. The results will allow the PI team to evaluate the possible effects of congestion pricing in this market. The PI team will use both the detailed data and variation in the shadow price created by the usage-based pricing used by some providers to estimate demand. The demand estimates are then used to compute the effects of usage based pricing on consumer welfare. Furthermore, by exploiting exogenous variation in the configuration of the network the team can estimate the impact of congestion on both usage and welfare. This allows them to compute the equilibrium effect of congestion pricing.The results of this research form an important window on internet pricing and usage that sheds new light on recent policy debates on regulation of the internet.

宽带互联网接入现已普及；美国约有 2.1 亿用户，而 2000 年约为 800 万。这些用户平均每月使用互联网的时间为 30 小时，而 1995 年仅为每月 1 小时。令人惊讶的是，人们对互联网接入需求的基本原理知之甚少，例如每 GB 数据的支付意愿或网络拥塞造成的外部性的重要性。 造成这种差距的一个关键原因是缺乏宽带使用的详细数据。该项目使用一组北美互联网服务提供商的用户级服务计划和每小时使用情况的独特数据集来研究宽带服务的定价和使用情况。 研究团队将制作宽带使用的描述性统计数据，估计宽带接入的需求和支付意愿，评估基于使用的定价的福利影响，并分析网络拥塞对需求的影响。 结果将使 PI 团队能够评估拥堵定价对该市场可能产生的影响。 PI 团队将使用详细数据和影子价格的变化（某些提供商使用基于使用的定价来估计需求）。 然后，需求估计用于计算基于使用的定价对消费者福利的影响。 此外，通过利用网络配置的外生变化，团队可以估计拥塞对使用和福利的影响。 这使他们能够计算拥堵定价的均衡效应。这项研究的结果形成了互联网定价和使用的一个重要窗口，为最近有关互联网监管的政策辩论提供了新的线索。