Some Economics of User Interfaces

Hal Varian ()

Computational Economics from EconWPA

Abstract: I examine the incentives for software providers to design appropriate user interfaces. There are two sorts of costs involved when one uses software: the fixed cost of learning to use a piece of software and the the variable cost of operating the software. For example menu driven software is easy to learn, but tedious to operate. I show that a monopoly provider of software generally invests the ``right'' amount of resources in making the software easy to learn, but too little in making it easy to operate. In some extreme cases a monopolist may even make the software {\it too\/} easy to learn.

JEL-codes: C8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1994-01-18
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