The Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition (CTIC) and Warren Center for Network & Data Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce the nine exceptional projects that will receive grants as part of its new project on “The Economics of Digital Services,” a new initiative to promote research on digital platforms.

The grant recipients are outstanding scholars pursuing pathbreaking research on the economic impact of companies’ increasing reliance on data and algorithms and the emerging use of new business models, such as vertical integration. In awarding these grants, the project placed special emphasis on supporting early-career researchers on the verge of becoming a new generation of scholars pursuing research on these topics.

This research is made possible through a $350,000 investment in CTIC by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The project, led by Rakesh Vohra and Christopher Yoo, is part of Knight Foundation’s $50 million initiative to support scholarly inquiry and novel approaches that will strengthen our democracy as the digital age progresses.

The nine diverse projects and scholars are:

• • Yannis Bakos and Hanna Halaburda (New York University), Smart Contracts, IoT Sensors and Democratization of the Competitive Landscape
  • Joan Calzada (University of Barcelona), Nestor Duch (European Joint Research Center), and Ricard Gil (Queen’s University), Media Plurality and News Consumption: The Impact of Search Engines on the Media Industry
  • Juan Camilo Castillo (University of Pennsylvania), Competition in Cloud Computing
  • Cristobal Cheyre (Cornell University), Li Jiang (George Washington University), Alisa Frik (UC Berkeley), Florian Schaub (University of Michigan), and Alessandro Acquisti (Carnegie Mellon University), The Effect of Ad-Blocking and Anti-Tracking on Consumer Behavior
  • Avinash Collis (University of Texas), Measuring the Economic Value of Data
  • Hanming Fang (University of Pennsylvania) and Soo Jin Kim (ShanghaiTech University), Data Neutrality and Market Competition
  • Ricard Gil (Queen’s University), Big Data Adoption and Employment in Small and Medium Enterprises
  • Jeremy Greenwood (University of Pennsylvania), Macroeconomic Analysis of Digital Advertising
  • Liad Wagman (Illinois Institute of Technology), Consumer Surplus and Technology Releases in the App Ecosystem

The research resulting from these grants will be presented at a conference in Spring 2021 and will also be published as blog posts on the Economics of Digital Services project website. Research results will also be shared through training and policy outreach programs, especially those geared toward government officials interested in learning more about the technical and economic underpinnings of modern digital services.