This lecture provides an introduction to the economics of Internet search engines. After a brief review of the historical development of the technology and the industry, I describe some of the economic features of the auction system used for displaying ads. It turns out that some relatively...

This lecture provides an introduction to the economics of Internet search engines. After a brief review of the historical development of the technology and the industry, I describe some of the economic features of the auction system used for displaying ads. It turns out that some relatively...

This article provides an overview of Google, focusing on its economic history, specifically on three topics of interest: the ad auction, the IPO auction and the role of economics at Google.

The gold standard for scientific research is reproducible controlled experiments. In the last two or three decades economics has made much progress in implementing experiments in both the laboratory and in the field. I propose that the NSF should set up a program to fund field...

Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have been around for many years. However, in the last 5 years, remarkable progress has been made using multilayered neural networks in diverse areas such as image recognition, speech recognition, and machine translation. AI is a general...

Broadband, or high-speed access to the Internet, has generated significant economic benefits. Certain regulations, however, are slowing investment and deterring entry into the broadband market. In this statement, we make two recommendations that would remedy these regulatory defects and thereby...

The term "network effects" has a clear meaning in economics but non-economists often confuse it with other concepts such as increasing returns to scale and learning-by-doing. This essay is an attempt to clear up some of this confusion