Jeffrey K. MacKie-MasonUniversity of California, Berkeley | UCB · School of Information
Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason
Ph.D. Economics
About
148
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Introduction
I'm currently the University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer at UC Berkeley. I'm also a professor in the School of Information, and in the Dept of Economics at UCB.
Previously I was dean of the School of Information at the University of Michigan (2010-2015), where I was also the Arthur W. Burks Collegiate Professor of Information and Computer Science, a professor in the Department of Economics, and a professor in the Ford School of Public Policy.
Additional affiliations
September 1996 - present
January 1994 - July 1994
September 1990 - August 1991
Education
September 1982 - May 1986
Publications
Publications (148)
This is a set of Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) about the economic, institutional, and technological structure of the Internet. We describe the history and current state of the Internet, discuss some of the pressing economic and regulatory problems, and speculate about future developments. What is aFAQ? FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Que...
A market-based scheduling mechanism allocates resources indexed by time to alternative uses based on the bids of participating agents. Agents are typically interested in multiple time slots of the schedulable resource, with value determined by the earliest deadline by which they can complete their corresponding tasks. Despite the strong complementa...
This paper provides clear evidence of substantial tax effects on the choice between issuing debt or equity; most studies fail to find significant effects. The relationship between tax shields and debt policy is clarified. Other papers miss the fact that most tax shields have a negligible effect on the marginal tax rate for most firms. New predictio...
Humans are "smart components" in a system, but cannot be directly programmed to perform; rather, their autonomy must be respected as a design constraint and incentives provided to induce desired behavior. Sometimes these incentives are properly aligned, and the humans don't represent a vulnerability. But often, a misalignment of incentives causes a...
Will the economics of improving IT lead us to more or less personal privacy?
OSI2016 Workgroup Question: Do researchers and scientists participate in the current system of scholarly publishing because they like it, they need it, they don’t have a choice in the matter, or they don’t really care one way or another? What perceptions, considerations and incentives do academicians have for staying the course (like impact factors...
Do researchers and scientists participate in the current system of scholarly publishing because they like it, they need it, they don’t have a choice in the matter, or they don’t really care one way or another? What perceptions, considerations and incentives do academicians have for staying the course (like impact factors and tenure points), and wha...
We review incentive-centered design for user-contributed content (UCC) on the Internet. UCC systems, produced (in part) through voluntary contributions made by non-employees, face fundamental incentives problems. In particular, to succeed, users need to be motivated to contribute in the first place ("getting stuff in"). Further, given heterogeneity...
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60416/1/envir1.pdf
We offer a microeconomic model of the two-sided market for the dominant form of spam:
bulk, unsolicited, and commercial advertising email. Most most spam is advertising, and thus should be modeled as a problem in the market supply and demand for advertising, rather than the usual approach of modeling spam as pure social cost to be eliminated. We ad...
The economic analysis of the digital economy has been a rapidly developing research area for more than a decade. Through authoritative examination by leading scholars, this publication takes a closer look at particular industries, business practices, and policy issues associated with the digital industry. The volume offers an up-to-date account of...
Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with the exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. Auction theory provides little guidance for dealing with this problem. We present a new family of decisiontheoretic bidding strategies that use probabilistic predictions of final...
There are at least two competing visions for the future National Information Infrastructure. One model is based on the application-blind architecture of the Internet; the other is based on the applicationaware architecture of cable TV systems and online services. Among application-aware architectures, some are content-aware and some are content-bli...
In a world in which people voluntarily live their private lives in public, we need to work with behavioral science to design and create safe public spaces.
"Many of us cannot imagine living in a world without instantaneous communications, entertainment or immediate access to information. But are we too dependent on this technology? What is our future as citizens of the digital world?"
Interview with Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Hajj E. Flemings about implications of explosion of social media.
User-contributed content as an input to the production of information services is not new, but it is growing rapidly in significance and prevalence. Open-source software, Wikipedia, and Flickr are but a few examples of the variety of information products and services relying on user-contributed content. I propose a characterization of user-contribu...
Many online systems for bilateral transactions elicit performance feedback from both transacting partners. Such bilateral feedback giving introduces strategic considerations. We focus on reciprocity in the giving of feedback: how prevalent a strategy of giving feedback is only if feedback is first received from one’s trading partner. The overall le...
Some user-contributed content (UCC) applications, such as Yahoo!Answers,Wikipedia, and YouTube have drawn much media attention. Various reasons motivate the tremendous contributions to a few UCC systems so far. Existing literature has uncovered many factors that affect users’ decisions to become contributors [Bryant et al., 2005], to continue contr...
What is an informatics degree, and why? These are questions that have been posed to us on innumerable occasions for almost a decade by students, parents, employers, and colleagues, and when asked to prepare a Communications Education column to answer that question, we jumped at the opportunity.
Course provides a strong grounding in the economics of information goods and services. Students analyze strategic issues faced by for-profit and not-for-profit organizations: pricing, bundling, versioning, product differentiation and variety, network externalities, and rights management. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64937/5/MacKi...
Course prepares you to advise clients or your own organization on the design of contracts and screening policies when one of the parties has an information advantage over the other. For example, students study the design of patent licenses (the licensor knows more about the market), the design of social systems to reduce spam (the spam sender knows...
Incentive-Centered design (ICD) for security system which is gaining widespread importance is discussed. The concrete design principles distinguish ICD from much of the recent work in security economics. Familiar security technologies for keeping security breaches out are ICD solutions. ICD is an emerging, multidisciplinary research methodology for...
Social computing systems collect, aggregate, and share usercontributed content, and therefore depend on contributions from users to function properly. However, humans are intelligent beings and cannot be programmed to behave; system designers must provide incentives to encourage users to contribute. We explore the behavioral consequences of
one sim...
Social computing systems collect, aggregate, and share usercontributed content, and therefore depend on contributions from users to function properly. However, humans are intelligent beings and cannot be programmed to behave; system designers must provide incentives to encourage users to contribute. We explore the behavioral consequences of one sim...
This paper describes a controlled field experiment to investigate the effects of product bundling and pricing structures for electronic access to scholarly literature. We describe the market economics of the publishing business, and describe some important economic problems facing both research libraries and scholarly journal publishers. We then ex...
Hackers have learned to leverage the enormous number of poorly protected home computers by turning them into a large distributed system (known as a botnet),making
home computers an important frontier for ecurity research. They present special problems: owners are unsophisticated, and usage profiles are varied making onesize-
fits-all firewall polic...
Prior theory and empirical work emphasize the enormous free-riding problem facing peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing net- works. Nonetheless, many P2P networks thrive. We ex- plore two possible explanations that do not rely on altru- ism or explicit mechanisms imposed on the network: di- rect and indirect private incentives for the provision of public good...
The Symposium on Electronic Scientific, Technical, and Medical (STM) Journals and Its Implications addressed five key areas. The first two areas addressed--costs of publication and publication business models and revenue--focused on the STM publishing enterprise as it exists today and, in particular, how it has evolved since the advent of electroni...
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60421/1/COMPLUTENSE.PDF
Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with various strategic problems, depending on preference structure. As long as bids represent non-repudiable offers, submitting noncontingent bids to separate auctions entails an exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. With mult...
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/63449/1/gazzale-jmm-peak-usercost.html
Humans are ???smart components??? in a system, but cannot be directly programmed to perform; rather, their autonomy must be respected as a design constraint and incentives provided to induce desired behavior. Sometimes these incentives are properly aligned, and the humans don???t represent a vulnerability. But often, a misalignment of incentives ca...
For the past two years, researchers in Economics at the University of Michigan have worked in collaboration with the University of Michigan Library to design and run an experiment in Pricing Electronic Access to Knowledge. PEAK is both a production service for electronic journal delivery and an opportunity for experimental pricing research that pro...
This review essay introduces the 15 selected papers from the 25th Annual TPRC. We mention major telecom policy highlights of 1997, then offer a light interpretative essay with summaries of the papers. We organize the discussion intofive general sections: Historical, Telephony, The Internet, The Media, and Comparative Studies in Telephone and Satell...
Dramatic increases in the capabilities and decreases in the costs of computers and communication networks have fomented revolutionary thoughts in the scholarly publishing community. In one dimension, traditional pricing schemes and product packages are being modified or replaced. We designed and undertook a large-scale field experiment in pricing a...
The appropriate role of the economic expert in antitrust litigation is to seek the truth, whereas the role for the attorneys is to seek the best possible outcome possible for the client. Yet the attorneys hire the economic experts, and the experts often work closely in many aspects of researching and developing the client's case. Can an expert econ...
In 1987 seventeen small companies filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Eastman Kodak Corporation, alleging that Kodak used its monopoly power over repair parts for its high-volume copiers and micrographics equipment in order to monopolize the service markets for those machines. Eleven years later, there have been two District Court opinions, two...
Information goods are characterized by high fixed (first-copy) costs, but very low costs for the production of additional copies. Marginal costs of electronically-delivered information goods have been further reduced by the remarkable recent decline in computing and digital communication costs. Most previous research focuses on how a monopolist wou...
The creation of interface standards enables competition at the level of components, rather than competition in complete systems. Consumers often benefit from component competition. However, the standard-setting process might be manipulated to achieve anticompetitive ends. We consider the conditions under which a standards consortium could impose an...
There are well-known circumstances under which unilateral refusals to license will cause harm to competition, that is, will lower consumer welfare. However, when the strategy is profitable, refusals to license also increase the returns to intellectual property, and thus limitations on them will reduce the incentives for firms to invest in innovatio...
People are the weakest link in security (Anderson, 1993). People write passwords on sticky notes on the screen. People don't patch their home systems and become botnet zombies. People choose whether to label a patch critical or just recommended. Our moti- vating insight is that these actions generally reflect motivated behavior in response to the c...
Computer automation has the potential, just starting to be realized, of transforming the design and operation of markets, and the behaviors of agents trading in them. We discuss the possibilities for automating markets, presenting a broad conceptual framework covering resource allocation as well as enabling marketplace services such as search and t...
Written with Lian Jian. Prior theory and empirical work emphasize the enormous free-riding problem facing peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing networks. Nonetheless, many P2P networks thrive. We explore two possible explanations: private provision of public goods and generalized reciprocity. We investigate a particular form of private incentives to share con...
We implemented one of the first web-based online field experiments of fund-raising. We embedded our experiment in the Internet Public Library to test four mechanisms: Voluntary Contribution (VCM), Premium, Seed Money and Matching. Although the gift size is not significantly different across mechanisms, the Seed and Matching mechanisms each generate...
Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with the exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. Auction theory provides little guidance for dealing with this problem. We present a new family of decisiontheoretic bidding strategies that use probabilistic predictions of final...
Dramatic increases in the capabilities and decreases in the costs of computers and communication networks have fomented revolutionary thoughts in the scholarly publishing community. In one dimension, traditional pricing schemes and product packages are being modified or replaced. We designed and undertook a large-scale field experiment in pricing a...
In a market-based scheduling mechanism, the allocation of time-specific resources to tasks is governed by a competitive bidding process. Agents bidding for multiple, separately allocated time slots face the risk that they will succeed in obtaining only part of their requirement, incurring expenses for potentially worthless slots. We investigate the...
Digital information economies require information goods producers to learn how to position themselves within a potentially vast product space. Further, the topography of this space is often nonstationary, due to the interactive dynamics of multiple producers changing their positions as they try to learn the distribution of consumer preferences and...
A market-based scheduling mechanism allocates resources indexed by time to alternative uses based on the bids of participating agents. Agents are typically interested in multiple time slots of the schedulable resource, with value determined by the earliest deadline by which they can complete their corresponding tasks. Despite the strong complementa...
Many corporations do not claim all of their allowable tax depreciation deductions. Intuitively, this kind of behavior might seem odd. However we propose several possible explanations. First, we find strong evidence that firms facing current tax losses or carrying forward past losses underutilize depreciation in order to recover tax losses before th...
Digital information goods potentially provide information producers with a new set of strategies, or price schedules, for offering these goods to a consumer population. If consumer preferences are known, then a producer can choose from the available schedules according to the profits they are able to extract.
In an economy in which a producer must learn the preferences of a consumer population, it is faced with a classic decision problem: when to explore and when to exploit. If the producer has a limited number of chances to experiment, it must explicitly consider the cost of learning (in terms of foregone profit) against the value of the information ac...
The Federal Circuit's decision in CSU v. Xerox1 has generated enormous controversy. However, there seems to be emerging agreement among both critics and supporters of the decision on a correct, narrow reading of the decision. Whatever else the decision stands for, it appears to declare antitrust immunity for unilateral refusals to sell or license p...
We explore a scenario in which a monopolist producer of information goods seeks to maximize its profits in a market where consumer demand shifts frequently and unpredictably. The producer is free to set an arbitrarily complex price schedule-a function that maps the set of purchased items to a price-but without direct knowledge of consumer demand it...
Information goods can be reconfigured at low cost. Therefore, firms can choose how to differentiate their products at a frequency comparable to price changes. However, doing so effectively is complicated by uncertainty about customer preferences, compounded by the fact that the search for a good product niche is carried out in competition with othe...
Market-based techniques represent a general approach to resource allocation in decentralized environments. In dynamic situations, the ability to find effective allocations of resources without central information and control is a crucial element of adaptivity. This report covers market models developed for a variety of resource allocation problems....
The Internet continues to evolveasitreaches out to a wider user population. The recent introduction of user-friendly navigation and retrieval tools for the World Wide Web has triggered an unprecedented level of interest in the Internet among the media and the general public, as well as in the technical community. It seems inevitable that some chang...
Admission control and congestion control can provide performance guarantees in ATM networks. However some users may not be able to describe their traffic accurately enough for the network to provide these guarantees. By sending a dynamic feedback signal about the current utilization of network resources, the network could provide some guarantees to...
Markets for digital information goods provide the possibility of exploring new and more complex pricing schemes, due to information goods' flexibility and negligible marginal cost. In this paper we compare the dynamic performance of price schedules of varying complexity under two different specifications of consumer demand shifts. A monopolist prod...
Decentralized scheduling is the problem of allocating resources to alternative possible uses over time, where competing uses are represented by autonomous agents. Market mechanisms use prices derived through distributing bidding protocols to determine schedules. We investigate the existence of equilibrium prices for some general classes of scheduli...
Auction off write access (give universal read access) ?One-shot 20 min. clearing, agents bid to control weights on document placement in cache ? incentive compatibility possible with, e.g., 2nd price auction ?NOTE: Provides deterministic QoS 1999 Chan, Womer, MacKie-Mason, Jamin Market-Based Web Caching 7 Implementation: Market for Objects (A-swLFU...
Exploring how information technologies, in particular the Internet, are upending fundamental economic and social structures.
At the beginning of 2000, the U.S. economy was enjoying the longest period of sustained growth and economic prosperity in its history. According to The Internet Upheaval, part of the explanation for this phenomenon is a conse...
Over 20 recent antitrust cases have turned on whether competition in complex durable-equipment markets prevents manufacturers from exercising market power over proprietary aftermarket products and services. We show that the price in the aftermarket will exceed marginal cost despite competition in the equipment market. Absent perfectly contingent lo...
This is a set of Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) about the economic, institutional, and technological structure of the Internet.
Due to differences in server capacity, external bandwidth, and client demand, some Web servers value cache hits more than others. Assuming that a shared cache knows the extent to which different servers value hits, it may employ a value-sensitive replacement policy in order to generate higher aggregate value for servers. We consider both the predic...
Market-based techniques represent a general approach to resource
allocation in decentralized environments. In dynamic situations, the
ability to find effective allocations of resources without central
information and control is a crucial element of adaptivity. The Michigan
Adaptive Resource eXchange (MARX) Project has developed marker models
for a...
Dramatic increases in the capabilities and decreases in the costs of computers and communication networks have fomented revolutionary thoughts in the scholarly publishing community. In one dimension, traditional pricing schemes and product packages are being modified or replaced. We designed and undertook a large-scale field experiment in pricing a...
America Online (AOL) is the largest, and in some aspects dominant, firm in the aggregation and distribution of content and services over the Internet. AOL is also the largest provider of Internet access in the U.S. Overall, it is the most successful firm in the business of online services, or the joint provision of Internet access and content and s...
Dramatic increases in the capabilities of computers and communication networks, accompanied by equally dramatic decreases in cost, have fomented revolutionary thoughts in the scholarly publishing community. This paper concerns a controlled field experiment to investigate the effects of product bundling and pricing structures for electronic access t...
Markets for electronic goods provide the possibility of exploring new and more complex pricing schemes, due to the flexibility of information goods and negligible marginal cost. In this paper we compare dynamic performance across price schedules of varying complexity. We provide a monopolist producer with two machine learning methods which implemen...
Web caches currently deployed on the Internet operate under a pull model in which client request streams determine the content of the cache. An alternative push model would allow web servers to pro-actively replicate their contents to caches. Given the finite amount of cache space, a question arises as to which objects should be kept in cache. In [...
We present an approach to the admission control and resource allocation problem in connection-oriented networks that offer multiple services to users. Users' preferences are summarized by means of their utility functions, and each user is allowed to request more than one type of service. Multiple types of resources are allocated at each link along...
Disk space in shared Web caches can be diverted to serve some system users at the expense of others. Cache hits reduce server loads, and if servers desire load reduction to different degrees, a replacement policy which prioritizes cache space across servers can provide differential quality-of-service (QoS). We present a simple generalization of lea...
Commerce in information goods is one of the earliest emerging applications for intelligent agents in commerce. However, the fundamental characteristics of information goods mean that they can and likely will be offered in widely varying configurations. Participating agents will need to deal with uncertainty about both prices and location in multi-d...
Bilateral negotiation over a single good or service is a fundamental problem for automated systems, and is surprisingly resistant to general solutions. In this paper we offer advice and new results for the design of electronic negotiation and market systems. We review the theoretical and experimental literature as guide to pragmatic design. We then...
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60419/1/06bonn.html
In order to combat Internet congestion Web caches use replacement policies that attempt to keep the objects in a cache that are most likely to get requested in the future. We adopt the economic perspective that the objects with the greatest value to the users should be in a cache. Using trace driven simulations we implement an incentive compatible...
I present a decentralized market protocol for allocating and scheduling tasks among agents to form supply chains. The protocol resolves constraints arising from hierarchical subtask relationships and resource scarcity. Agents negotiate through auctions according to specified bidding policies, and the auctions in turn determine the allocations and p...
There are at least two competing visions for the future National Information Infrastructure. One model is based on the application-blind architecture of the Internet; the other is based on the application-aware architecture of cable TV systems and online services. Among application-aware architectures, some are content-aware and some are content-bl...
. This paper was prepared for the conference "Public Access to the Internet," JFK School of Government, May 26--27 , 1993. We describe the technology and cost structure of the NSFNET backbone of the Internet, and discuss how one might price Internet access and use. We argue that usage-based pricing is likely to be necessary to control congestion on...
. This paper was prepared for the Tenth Michigan Public Utility Conference at Western Michigan University March 25--27, 1993. We describe the history, technology and cost structure of the Internet. We also describe a possible smart-market mechanism for pricing congestion on the Internet. Keywords. Networks, Internet, NREN, NII. Address. Hal R. Vari...
. This is a list of Frequently Asked Questions about usage-based pricing of the Internet. We argue that usage-based pricing is likely to come sooner or later and that some serious thought should be devoted to devising a sensible system of usage-based pricing. Keywords. Internet, FAQs, usage-based pricing Address. Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason, Hal R. Var...
The Internet continues to evolve as it reaches out to a wider user population. The recent introduction of user-friendly navigation and retrieval tools for the World Wide Web has triggered an unprecedented level of interest in the Internet among the media and the general public, as well as in the technical community. It seems inevitable that some ch...
. It has been noticed in several countries that many corporations do not claim all of their allowable tax depreciation deductions, despite incurring a higher tax cost. There are several possible explanations. First, the uniform reporting accounting system (typical of many European countries) can under certain circumstances constrain dividends. The...
Admission control and congestion control can provide performance guarantees in ATM networks. However some users may not be able to describe their traffic accurately enough for the network to provide these guarantees. By sending a dynamic feedback signal about the current utilization of network resources, the network could provide some guarantees to...
. Creating successful competitive electric power markets requires transmission pricing reform. Due to the physics of power transmission networks, efficient transmission prices must incorporate two types of loop flow externalities, and must be determined jointly with efficient power (nodal) prices. Prior proposed market schemes all involve an approx...