Using massive online choice experiments to measure changes in well-being

Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis () and Felix Eggers
Additional contact information
Avinash Collis: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02142
Felix Eggers: Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, 9747 AE Groningen, The Netherlands

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019, vol. 116, issue 15, 7250-7255

Abstract: Gross domestic product (GDP) and derived metrics such as productivity have been central to our understanding of economic progress and well-being. In principle, changes in consumer surplus provide a superior, and more direct, measure of changes in well-being, especially for digital goods. In practice, these alternatives have been difficult to quantify. We explore the potential of massive online choice experiments to measure consumer surplus. We illustrate this technique via several empirical examples which quantify the valuations of popular digital goods and categories. Our examples include incentive-compatible discrete-choice experiments where online and laboratory participants receive monetary compensation if and only if they forgo goods for predefined periods. For example, the median user needed a compensation of about $48 to forgo Facebook for 1 mo. Our overall analyses reveal that digital goods have created large gains in well-being that are not reflected in conventional measures of GDP and productivity. By periodically querying a large, representative sample of goods and services, including those which are not priced in existing markets, changes in consumer surplus and other new measures of well-being derived from these online choice experiments have the potential for providing cost-effective supplements to the existing national income and product accounts.

Keywords: consumer surplus; digital goods; free goods; GDP choice experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Using Massive Online Choice Experiments to Measure Changes in Well-being (2019)
Working Paper: Using Massive Online Choice Experiments to Measure Changes in Well-being (2019)
Working Paper: Using Massive Online Choice Experiments to Measure Changes in Well-being (2018)
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