Measuring Welfare with Massive Online Choice Experiments: A Brief Introduction
AEA Papers and Proceedings, Vol.108: 473-76, 2018.
6 Pages Posted: 1 May 2018 Last revised: 22 Mar 2019
Date Written: May 1, 2018
Abstract
GDP is a measure of production and yet it is widely used as a proxy for well-being. It is particularly ill-suited for assessing the contributions of digital goods which are free to consumers and thus excluded from GDP measures. This underscores the need to develop new measures of well-being which can assess not only the contributions of digital goods but also welfare more generally. In Brynjolfsson, Eggers, and Gannamaneni (2017), we propose a new way of measuring consumer welfare using massive online choice experiments. This brief paper motivates the need for such an approach and introduces the method.
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