The welfare gain to consumers from the introduction of personal computers is estimated here. A simple model of consumer demand is formulated that uses a slightly modified version of standard preferences. The modification permits marginal utility, and hence total utility, to be finite when the...

Theoretical research on self-selection and cannibalization suggests that brand quality may affect consumers' choice of products from a menu of similar offerings. However, few studies have empirically considered the effect of product variety under brand influence. This paper examines the demand...

This paper is designed to enlarge our understanding of how computing is perceived. It uses findings from a quantitative and qualitative study of Computer Science and Psychology students. The paper shows how students believe they have an equal chance in Computing Science and are failing to...

Changing product quality, rapid technological progress, and short product life cycles make it difficult to compute indices that correctly reflect the true price movements of IT products. This paper assesses the differences between traditional and quality adjusted indices by providing results for...

Computational notebooks offer researchers, practitioners, students, and educators the ability to interactively conduct analytics and disseminate reproducible workflows that weave together code, visuals, and narratives. This article explores the potential of computational notebooks in urban...

Cortical processing is a set of organized computations carried out by a large set of cortical cell assemblies (CA) widely distributed over the entire cortex. These CAs specialize in computing specific pieces of information, called here, information granules. The most elementary information...

Concerns over the perceived negative impacts of computers on social development among children are prevalent but largely uninformed by plausibly causal evidence. We provide the first test of this hypothesis using a large-scale randomized control experiment in which more than one thousand...

This paper examines the effect of the One Laptop Per Child program in Uruguay [Plan Ceibal] on household labor income. Since 2007, the Uruguayan government has delivered one laptop to every child and every teacher in public primary schools. This program has considerably increased access to...

In this paper we examine the importance of local spillovers such as network externalities and learning from others in the diffusion of home computers using data on 110,000 U.S. households in 1997. Controlling for many individual characteristics, we find that people are more likely to buy their...