The Economics of Information and Communication Technology
This page is primarily for Vanderbilt University students taking
Economics 3270
Syllabus
Syllabus for Spring 2024
Course Description
Advances in information and communications technology (ICT) have had a transformative effect on our society and economy. The first Internet browser was developed by Marc Andreessen of the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) in 1993, and now cloud computing, social networks, ecommerce, streaming content, big data, analytics, informatics, VOIP, MMOG, and universal wireless connectivity part of our daily lives. Emerging technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, blockchain, and quantum computing will have an enormous impact in the next several years. Economists are certainly aware of these innovations, but economic research in ICT is limited and scattered. This course will survey what economics has to say about ICT and try to outline what still needs to be done. Students should gain an understanding of how these technologies came into being, how they fit together, and where they might lead us in the future. Class participation will be emphasized.
Textbook
I have have been writing a textbook entitled “The Economics of Information and Communications Technology“. The focus is to point the reader to the basic tools from different areas of economics that directly relate to the policy and social questions raised by specific aspects of ICT. It does not, however, attempt to give detailed economic analyses since this would essentially require us to explain the whole corpus of the field, including especially game theory, micro, macro, behavioral, network, and computational economics, industrial organization, finance, public economics, law and economics, business economics and even economic history, Instead, the objective is to provide a high level view of what economics has to say about ICT, and offer readers a structure to think about the issues and challenges that these transformative technologies pose for our society. society.
The Economics of Information and Communications Technology
Readings
Chapter 1: Introduction
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Chapter 2: The History and Future of ICT
Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Andy Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica, and Matei Zaharia (2010) “A View of Cloud Computing”, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 53, pp. 50-58
Ergin Bayrak, John P. Conley and Simon Wilkie (2011) “The Economics of Cloud Computing” Korean Economic Review, Vol. 27, pp. 203-230
Jason Dedrick, Vijay Gurbaxani, and Kenneth L. Kraemer (2003) “Information Technology and Economic Performance: A Critical Review of the Empirical Evidence” ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 1–28
Avi Goldfarb and Catherine Tucker (2019) “Digital Economics” Journal of Economic Literature Vol.57 pp. 3–43
Hal Varian (2003) “Economics of Information Technology”, Working paper
Simon Wilkie (2016) “Economic Perspectives on the Digital Transformation” Power Point Deck
Chapter 3: Information Creation, Marketing, and Protection
John P. Conley and Fan-chin Kung (2010) “Private Benefits, Warm Glow and Reputation in the Free and Open Source Software Production Model” Journal of Public Economic Theory, (Special issue edited by Ted Bergstrom, Parkash Chander and Lise Vesterlund), Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 665-689
Georg von Krogh and Eric von Hippel (2003) “Special issue on open source software development” Research Policy, Vol. 32 pp. 1149–1157
Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole (2005) “The Economics of Technology Sharing: Open Source and Beyond”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 19, pp. 99-120
Eric Raymond (2000) “Homesteading the Noosphere”, Working paper
Eric Raymond (2000) “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, Working paper
Eric Raymond (2000), “Revenge of the Hackers”, Working paper
Hal Varian (2005) “Copying and Copyright”, Working paper
Chapter 4: Computers and Hardware
Rajeev Alur, Emery Berger, Ann W. Drobnis, Limor Fix, Kevin Fu, Gregory D. Hager, Daniel Lopresti, Klara Nahrstedt, Elizabeth Mynatt, Shwetak Patel, Jennifer Rexford, John A. Stankovic, and Benjamin Zorn (2016) “Systems Computing Challenges in the Internet of Things” https://arxiv.org/abs/1604
Mary Meeker (2017) “Internet Trends 2017 – Code Conference” Slide Deck, kpcb.com/InternetTrends
Joseph Y. Halpern and Rafael Pass (2015) “Algorithmic Rationality: Game Theory with Costly Computation” Journal of Economic Theory Vol 156, pp. 246-268
Jeffrey MacKie-Mason and Hal Varian (2006) “Some Economics of the Internet”, Working paper
Chapter 5: Networks and Infrastructure and Architecture
Mary Meeker (2017) “Internet Trends 2017 – Code Conference” Slide Deck, kpcb.com/InternetTrends
Picornell, Miguel, Tomás Ruiz, Maxime Lenormand, Jose Javier Ramasco, Thibaut Dubernet, and Enrique Frias-Martinez (2015) “Exploring the potential of phone call data to characterize the relationship between social network and travel behavior” Transportation Vol. 42, 42.10.1007/s11116-015-9594-1
Chapter 6: Wireless, Wired and Spectrum Basics
Badr Benmammar and Francine Krief (2014) “Game theory applications in wireless networks: A survey” In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Engineering, Parallel and Distributed Systems (SEPADS’14), Gdansk, Poland, 15–17 May 2014; pp. 15–17
John P. Conley, (2019) “Economic Implications of New Technologies for Licensed and Unlicensed Spectrum”, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers, VUECON-19-00011
Ericsson Mobility Report (2020) https://www.ericsson.com/4adc87/assets/local/mobility-report/documents/2020/november-2020-ericsson-mobility-report.pdf
Paul Milgrom, Jonathan Levin and Assaf Eilat (2011) “The Case for Unlicensed Spectrum” Discussion papers, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Richard Thanki (2009) “The Economic Value Generated by Current and Future Allocations of Unlicensed Spectrum” Perspective Associates, http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7020039036
Chapter 7: Systems Software
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Chapter 8: Encoding, Encrypting, Hashing, and Security Protocols
John P. Conley, (2019) “Encryption, Hashing, PPK, and Blockchain: A Simple Introduction”, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers, VUECON-19-00013
Chapter 9: Authentication
Christian Rathgeb and Andreas Uhl (2011) “A Survey on Biometric Cryptosystems and Cancelable Biometrics”EURASIP Journal on Information Security,Vol 2011, Article number: 3
Chapter 10: Banking and Credit
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Chapter 11: Blockchain Basics
John P. Conley (2019) “Proof of Honesty: Coalition-Proof Blockchain Validation without Proof of Work or Stake”
Yossi Gilad, Rotem Hemo, Silvio Micali, Georgios Vlachos, Nickolai Zeldovich (2017) “Algorand: Scaling byzantine agreements for cryptocurrencies” in Proc. 26th ACM Symp. Operating Syst. Principles, pp. 51–68
D. Mazières (2016) “The Stellar Consensus Protocol: A Federated Model for Internet-level Consensus” White Paper, https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf
Chapter 12: Blockchain, Game Theory, and Incentives
Joseph Abadi and Markus Brunnermeier (2018) “Blockchain Economics” Working paper
Primavera De Filippi and Benjamin Loveluck, B. (2016) “The invisible politics of Bitcoin: governance crisis of a decentralised infrastructure” Internet Policy Review, 5(3). DOI: 10.14763/2016.3.427
Ittay Eyal and Emin Gün Sirer (2014) “Majority is not enough: Bitcoin mining is vulnerable” Financial Cryptography and Data Security 18th International Conference, FC 2014, pp. 436–454
Houy, Nicolas (2014) “It will cost you nothing to “kill” a proof-of-stake crypto-currency” Economics Bulletin, Vol. 34, pp. 1038-1044
Aggelos Kiayias, Elias Koutsoupias, Maria Kyropoulou, and Yiannis Tselekounis (2016) “Blockchain Mining Games” eprint arXiv:1607.02420
Yuan Liu and and Chunyan Miao (2016) “A Survey of Incentives and Mechanism Design for Human Computation Systems” eprint arXiv:1602.03277
Chapter 13: Cryptocurrency and Monetary Theory
John P. Conley, (2017) “Blockchain and the Economics of Crypto-tokens and Initial Coin Offerings”, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers, VUECON-17-00008
John P. Conley, (2019) “Blockchain as a Decentralized Mechanism for Financial Inclusion and Economic Mobility”, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers, VUECON-19-00012
Chapter 14: Security and Privacy
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