Cheap, disposable online identities make abuse easier to externalize. Users can harass, evade bans, amplify content through fake accounts, or abandon a damaged reputation at low cost, while other users, moderators, and platforms bear the consequences. This paper examines verified pseudonymity as an institutional response to that problem. First, I model online communities as club-governed informational commons in which incivility degrades the shared environment and raises enforcement costs. The model shows that conduct can improve when sanctions attach to a persistent pseudonymous identity and when users have future access, reputation, or governance rights at stake. Second, I compare verified pseudonymity with open pseudonymity, real-name mandates, centralized know-your-customer verification, algorithmic moderation, and no intervention. Decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, proof of personhood, and non-transferable standing credentials matter because they can separate authentication from public identification. Third, I add a community-currency layer that separates access to scarce attention from governance rights. The result is a governance framework in which accountability depends less on public naming than on durable standing, credible sanctions, and reusable privacy-preserving credentials.

This paper examines how Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) function as self-governing institutions for managing Internet address resources and what episodes of stress reveal about the resilience and vulnerabilities of this system. Our analysis offers an institutional assessment of the RIR system and evaluates how it has responded to scarcity, technological change, and market pressures. We argue that the RIR model endures because its rules reflect Ostromian principles, including clearly defined boundaries, community participation, and credible monitoring, that sustain cooperation. Using these principles as normative benchmarks, we identify pathways for reform that preserve the RIRs’ decentralized, member-driven governance institutions while strengthening transparency, adaptability, and cross-regional resilience.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to profoundly transform and enrich experimental economic research. We propose a new software framework, “alter_ego”, which makes it easy to design experiments between LLMs and to integrate LLMs into oTree-based experiments with human subjects. Our toolkit is freely available at github.com/mrpg/ego. To illustrate, we run differently framed prisoner’s dilemmas with interacting machines as well as with human-machine interaction. Framing effects in machine-only treatments are strong and similar to those expected from previous human-only experiments, yet less pronounced and qualitatively different if machines interact with human participants.

As digital connectivity expands and more services become tradable online, international trade is increasingly transitioning into the digital realm. Consequently, the regulatory environment facilitating digital trade has emerged as a central aspect of trade policy. Empirical research plays a vital role in informing the design, implementation, and reform of regulatory policies to facilitate trade in the digital era. However, such research heavily relies on the availability of up-to-date regulatory information across various countries. This paper introduces the Digital Trade Integration (DTI) database, which provides an overview of regulatory policies and practices expected to impact digital trade integration across 146 countries. These measures are organized into 65 indicators and 12 policy pillars covering restrictive and enabling policies. This paper highlights global and regional trends that are considered the four main components of digital trade integration: regulating (Information and Communication Technology) ICT goods, online services, investment in sectors relevant to digital trade, and data. The findings underscore the necessity for ongoing research and policy development to foster an equitable and integrated global digital economy.

Are there positive or negative externalities in knowledge production? We analyze whether current contributions to knowledge production increase or decrease the future growth of knowledge. To assess this, we use a randomized field experiment that added content to some pages in Wikipedia while leaving similar pages unchanged. We compare subsequent content growth over the next 4 years between the treatment and control groups. Our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 4-year growth of content length larger than twelve percent. We can also rule out effects on 4-year growth of content quality larger than four points, which is less than one-fifth of the size of the treatment itself. The treatment increased editing activity in the first 2 years, but most of these edits only modified the text added by the treatment. Our results have implications for information seeding and incentivizing contributions. They imply that additional content may inspire future contributions in the short- and medium-term but do not generate large externalities in the long term.

Policies such as the SEC's Fair Disclosure Rule, and technologies such as SEC EDGAR, aim to disseminate corporate disclosures to a wider audience of investors in risky assets. In this study, we adopt an experimental approach to measure whether this wider disclosure is beneficial to these investors. Price-clearing equilibrium models based on utility maximization and non-revealing and fully-revealing prices predict that in a pure exchange economy, an arbitrary trader would prefer that no investors are informed rather than all are informed; non-revealing theory further predicts that an arbitrary trader would prefer a situation in which all traders are informed rather than half the traders are informed. These predictions can be summarized as “None > All > Half”. A laboratory study was conducted to test these predictions. Where previous studies have largely focused on information dissemination and its effects on equilibrium price and insider profits, we focus instead on traders’ expected utility, as measured by their preferences for markets in which none, half, or all traders are informed. Our experimental result contradicts the prediction and indicates “Half > None > All”, i.e. subjects favor a situation where a random half is informed. The implication is that in addition to testing predictions of price equilibrium, experiments should also be used to verify analytical welfare predictions of expected utility under different policy choices.

This paper examines the concept of decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), blockchain-based entities intended to operate without central authority or management hierarchy, through the lens of organisational economics. It compares DAOs with conventional organisational forms and explores whether DAOs represent a novel organisational form. The paper investigates DAOs in the context of the electronic markets hypothesis and applies theories from Demsetz, Jensen and Meckling, and Williamson to understand their potential long-term viability. A key finding is that for DAOs to function as claimed, they must effectively suppress agency costs through smart contracts and internal contestable markets. The paper also highlights the challenges DAOs face in maintaining adaptive integrity and fostering cooperative adaptation. While DAOs show promise in reducing certain transaction and information costs, their long-term viability depends on overcoming significant governance and participation hurdles.

The IT industry has been portrayed as instrumental to India’s transition to a high-growth economy. But critics argue that it has delivered few benefits to the wider population. In this context, industry advocates have drawn attention to the direct and indirect impact of IT on output and employment. This article critically explores these claims by locating them in the conventional (neoliberal) narrative of India’s recent economic development. It finds that industry claims are exaggerated and that IT industry demand is often linked to the creation of employment in industries dominated by informal employment arrangements. The prevalence of informal employment highlights problems of low pay and poor or hazardous working conditions. The IT industry’s rise to prominence has traversed a deeply ingrained process of labour market informalisation. In exaggerating the employment-generating capacity of the IT industry, its supporters have largely ignored problems relating to the quality of employment.

How is the rise of platform capitalism reinventing the traditional regime of familial production, while at the same time being energized by it? How do the historically informed, lived experiences of rural e-commerce entrepreneurs or workers in China help reconceptualize digital labor and platform studies? Deploying the analytic of platformized family production, this article addresses these questions through a deep description of the experiences of variously positioned platform-based and mediated laborers in an e-commerce village in East China. I argue that the ongoing process of platformizing family production is profoundly contradictory. As an alternative to a model of development based on unevenness and the rural-urban divide, village e-commerce has created opportunities for peasants and marginalized urban youth to achieve social mobility. However, it also shapes a new regime of value that privileges the individualized e-commerce entrepreneur as an ideal subject, and fetishizes and instrumentalizes innovation and creativity in conformity with the global intellectual property regime. These tendencies not only contradict the reality of collective labor organization both on e-commerce platforms and in villages, but also conflict with the indispensable role of manual labor in the production process—reinforcing rather than overcoming existing inequalities and stratification in rural China.

By analysing the recent emerging labour movement of Korean digital game workers, this article seeks to explore a relatively novel issue – the importance of a politics of body in digital labour. By employing Elaine Scarry’s concept of ‘language of agency’ and ‘analogical substantiation’, the article first investigates how digital game workers express their work experiences and their embodied pain by analysing the mechanism of ‘crunch’ practice. Second, by examining ‘karoshi (overwork to death)’ and a series of suicides of digital game workers in Korea, it seeks to explore the problem of death as the final form of bodily pain – focusing on how these death events led workers to develop new forms of politics and solidarity by organising labour unions. Finally, by analysing the newly established digital game worker unions’ opposition to the violation of worktime regulation as a ‘struggle for recognition’, this research illuminates how digital game workers not only acquire self-respect but also achieve social recognition for their bodies as working labour. By examining this labour union organisation practice in Korea, the study ultimately argues that recognising the politics of body in digital labour offers the possibility that an emerging social category of precariat can actually co-exist and connect with the existing social class of proletariat.

Did trade patterns in services change into activities that were more digital-intense after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, and was this shift structural? This paper uses a Difference-in-Difference (DID) approach to investigate whether services trade became more digital-based after the GFC in 2008. It finds support that the GFC formed a break from the previous period that caused services trade to become more digital – although there are signs that this had already started before 2008. Countries with high internet usage and a comparative advantage in digital-intense services, such as R&D, information exchange, computer services, and charges for Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), on average saw post-GFC a 6% increase in global exports compared to other non-digital sectors. More striking is that upper-middle income countries and countries with medium levels of skills also witnessed a sharp increase. These significant outcomes may indicate the direction into which patterns of services trade are likely to turn after the current economic crisis resulting from COVID-19.

When economists talk about ‘measurement’ they tend to refer to metrics that can capture changes in quantity, quality and distribution of goods and services. In this paper we argue that the digital transformation of the economy, particularly the rise of cloud computing as a general-purpose technology, can pose serious challenges to traditional concepts and practices of economic measurement. In the first part we show how quality-adjusted prices of cloud services have been falling rapidly over the past decade, which is currently not captured by the deflators used in official statistics. We then discuss how this enabled the spread of data-driven business models, while also lowering entry barriers to advanced production techniques such as artificial intelligence or robotic-process-automation. It is likely that these process innovations are not fully measured at present. A final challenge to measurement arises from the fragmentation of value chains across borders and increasing use of intangible intermediate inputs such as intellectual property and data. While digital technologies make it very easy for these types of inputs to be transferred within or between companies, existing economic statistics often fail to capture them at all.

We study a spatial competition model which is a variant of the celebrated Hotelling (1929) framework. One of the firm is a brick-and-mortar one while the other is on-line. Both firms sell the same product except that (constant) marginal costs may differ. Consumers going to the shop around the corner face transportation costs according to their adress whereas on-line consumers bear a fix cost that may capture technological burden and risk premium. In the pricing Nash equilibria the “new economy” firm has smaller market shares eventhough it offers more attractive prices. For the on-line firm to become a leader, the cost difference must be large enough to offset the comparative disadvantage it face on the demand side. In the long run, increasing competition ultimately forces the local firm out of downtown. We argue that this effect may be related to some of the forecasts concerning the geographical impact of the development of remote access services.

L'objectif de cet article est d'étudier le rôle d'Internet dans la formation du capital social. L'usage d'Internet a-t-il un impact sur la nature et l'intensité des investissements d'un individu dans des réseaux sociaux formels et informels ? Cette question est d'abord examinée d'un point de vue théorique à l'aide d'un modèle microéconomique d'investissement en capital social. Puis, à partir de données luxembourgeoises nous tentons d'identifier empiriquement les déterminants de l'investissement en capital social hors Internet et via Internet. Nous mettons en évidence un effet positif de l'usage d'Internet sur l'engagement dans des réseaux sociaux. Par ailleurs, nous montrons que la majorité des investissements en capital social via Internet viennent en complément des investissements hors Internet (investissements directs), sauf pour les individus ayant connu une mobilité ou une rupture dans le passé (géographique, professionnelle, affective). Ces derniers semblent tirer des bénéfices importants de l'usage de l'Internet, pour entretenir ou renouveler leur capital social.