A New Well-being Metric in the Era of the Digital Economy

该项目将推动数字经济时代福祉的经济衡量。为了评估生活水平的变化，进而评估可能影响生活水平的政策的影响，有必要适当地衡量所有商品和服务的福利收益。许多传统的商品和服务现在正被数字商品所取代。此外，数字技术的新应用正在改变生产过程，使传统商品的性质、品种和质量得以不断改变。然而，这些变化对福利的影响很难，甚至不可能在现有的官方统计中适当地反映出来。该项目将根据消费者剩余的变化，为数字时代开发一种新的幸福指标。这项研究将通过直接关注消费者剩余，而不是生产，来克服现有官方统计中的几个弱点。该方法还将考虑范围更广的商品和服务，包括那些零价格的商品和服务。这项研究可以作为联邦统计机构编制更可靠官方统计数据的模板。统计指标不仅在评估和影响经济市场的运作方面很重要，而且在设计和评价旨在发展社会的政策方面也很重要。这项研究的结果将使政策制定者、经济学家、统计学家和技术专家能够更好地理解经济中福利收益的主要来源，包括数字产品和技术。为了克服现有福祉指标在数字经济中捕捉商品价值的问题，该项目将衡量消费者剩余的变化，作为衡量福祉的一般指标。调查人员将通过大规模的在线选择实验，诱导消费者愿意接受（WTA）估值，以换取失去各种商品的机会。例如，每位消费者将被要求回答是否愿意一个月不上Facebook，以换取金钱回报。提供给不同消费者的钱会有所不同，这使得估计需求曲线和总消费者剩余成为可能。每个WTA问题都附有一个贝叶斯真相血清（BTS）问题，该问题要求消费者预测有多少比例的消费者会做出同样的选择。这个BTS问题有助于使调查动机兼容，因为它是最佳的如实回答每个WTA问题。通过这种方法，调查人员将从大约143个类别的商品和服务中估计消费者剩余，其中包括17个类别的免费数字商品。通过汇总所有类别的消费者剩余并评估随时间的变化，他们将提供一个新的幸福指标，称为国内生产总值-b （GDP-B）。虽然不打算取代传统的国民核算，但GDP-B和基于它的统计数据将更好地反映数字经济中的福祉。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project will advance economic measurement of well-being in the era of the digital economy. To assess changes in living standards, and by extension the effects of policies that might affect living standards, it is necessary to properly measure the welfare gains from all goods and services. Many traditional goods and services are now being replaced by digital goods. In addition, new applications of digital technologies are transforming the production process, allowing the nature, variety, and quality of traditional goods to be frequently changed. However, the welfare effects of these changes are difficult or even impossible to appropriately capture in existing official statistics. This project will develop a new well-being metric for the digital era based on changes in consumer surplus. The research will overcome several weaknesses in existing official statistics by focusing directly on consumer surplus, rather than production. The approach also will consider a much broader set of goods and services, including those with zero-price. The research may serve as a template for Federal statistical agencies to generate more reliable official statistics. Statistical indicators are important not only in assessing and affecting the functioning of the economic market, but also in designing and evaluating policies aimed at the development of society. The results of this research will enable policymakers, economists, statisticians, and technologists to better understand the main sources of welfare gains in the economy, including digital goods and technologies.To overcome the problems of existing well-being metrics to capture the value of goods in the digital economy, this project will measure changes in consumer surplus as a general measure of well-being. The investigators will elicit the consumers' willingness to accept (WTA) valuations in exchange for losing access to various goods using massive choice online experiments. For instance, each consumer will be asked to answer whether she would be willing to refrain from having access to Facebook for a month in exchange for a monetary payoff. The amount of money offered will vary across consumers, making it possible to estimate the demand curve and total consumer surplus. Each WTA question will be accompanied by a Bayesian-Truth-Serum (BTS) question, which asks a consumer to predict what percentage of consumers would have made the same choice. This BTS question helps make the survey incentive compatible because it is optimal to respond truthfully to each WTA question. With this approach, the investigators will estimate the consumer surplus from each of approximately 143 categories of goods and services including 17 categories of free digital goods. By aggregating the consumer surplus from all categories and assessing changes over time, they will provide a new well-being metric called Gross Domestic Product-B (GDP-B). While not intended to replace traditional national accounts, GDP-B and statistics based on it will provide a better picture of well-being in the digital economy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.