14.27
Economics of Digitization
Uses theoretical economic models and empirical evidence to help understand the past and likely future impacts that digitization has had on legacy markets and institutions. These models help frame class discussions on e-commerce, search, online advertising, traditional and social media, privacy, platform design, and distance learning, among other topics. Students complete a project, and those taking the graduate version have additional assignments.
Fall 2014 · Economics and E-Commerce
Topics
- Introduction
- Entry, Market Structure, and Concentration
- Online Auctions
- eBay: Growth and Changes Over Time
- The Shift Away from Auctions
- The Economics of Group Purchasing
- Price Search
- Search and Obfuscation on the Internet
- Extremely High Search Costs and the Internet
- E-retail
- Price Discrimination
- Sales Tax and E-commerce
- Search Advertising and Sponsored Links
- Auction Types and Settings
- Banner and Display Advertising Online
- Alibaba and Corporate Governance
- TBD
- Presentations
- Presentations (cont.)
Readings
- There isn’t really a good textbook for studying e-commerce, so coming to class and taking good notes will be particularly important. Some of the general economics topics I will cover in the beginning
- [C&W] = Church, Jeffrey, and Roger Ware. Industrial Organization: A Strategic Approach . McGraw-Hill, 1999. ISBN: 9780256205718.
- [PRN] = Pepall, Lynne, Dan Richards, and George Norman. Industrial Organization: Contemporary Theory and Empirical Applications . Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. ISBN: 9781405176323.
- [C&W] Chapter 4.
- [PRN] Chapter 5 and 6.
- [C&W] Chapters 7 and 8.
- [PRN] Chapters 9 and 10.
- [C&W] Chapters 14, 15, 20, and 21.
- [PRN] Chapters 12 and 13.
- Thomas, Owen. “Amazon.com Tests the Notion of Fixed Prices.” Business 2.0 . September 28, 2000.
Prerequisites & course information
Subject meets with 14.270 Prereq: 14.01 and ( 6.3700 or 14.30 ) U (Spring) 4-0-8 units. HASS-S
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Fall 2014
- MIT OCW calendar ↗
- MIT OCW readings ↗
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.