New Information Services – NIS

The extraordinary technological progress in information technologies is at the same time creating new industries and disrupting old ones. The importance of these disruptions is well known, but is still understudied by economists. Understanding the new issues requires developing our knowledge on the different layers of the information technology industries, as well as their implications for traditional information services

The project aims at developing collaborative work at the forefront of the research on the economics of new information services and electronic communications. Whereas most research on the economics of New Information Technologies has focused on some specific aspect, the objective of this project is to support a wide array of research which links the different layers of the information technology industries and to favor communication between the different projects. It is hoped that these dialogs will help develop a more integrated view of the industry.

Our project federates and fosters exchanges between researchers with a specific knowledge of various pieces of the puzzle in order to build the expertise for high level research integrating the relevant dimensions and for useful contribution on the public debates surrounding these new technologies. The team is widely open to international cooperation and has a well established reputation in the economic analysis of the new information technologies.

In this proposal, there are three levels of the industries that we consider which are determined from an industrial organization perspective and which we view as essential. The first layer is the physical infrastructure, the second layer consists in the intelligent part of the networks and in particular intellectual rights, standards and software, the third layer concerns the furniture of information goods and services online (the content) and its economic and societal impact.

The program develops collaborative work around three tasks, with a regular workshop and conference program.

The first task of the project will be directed to the study of the economics of the infrastructure: although much work has been done in the last twenty years on the regulation of the infrastructure of the telecommunications industries, the development of new technologies is creating new problems which need to be researched. In particular, innovative work is planned on interconnection, on switching costs and network competition, and finally on cloud computing.

The second task will be to study Software and Standards. We plan to focus our work on the links between different types of software, in particular Open Source and Proprietary Software and on the relationships between different standards and the possibility of using them in coordination.

The third task will be the study of web services, which will include, among others two major empirical study. One will focus on the acquisition of reputation in web platforms and the second on the social networks developed through mobile telephony. The consequences of the development of new technologies for the dissemination of academic work will also be an important focus of this work, as well as the economics of search engine.

Each task includes work that is transversal to all tasks such as work on network competition, on bundling or intellectual property rights.