Contenu du sommaire : De l'économie numérique à la transformation numérique de l'économie

This paper explores the welfare effects of coopetition between two-sided platforms in the context of a competitive bottleneck, i.e., when participants on one side of the market (the buyers) choose at most one platform (i.e., singlehome), while participants on the other side (the sellers) can be active on both platforms (i.e., multihome). Under coopetition, when platforms set their sellers' subscription prices cooperatively and buyers' subscription prices non-cooperatively, platforms internalize that when they reduce their price on the seller side, this will harm the rival platform by making it less attractive to buyers, and through the indirect network effects, to sellers too. Therefore, coopetition leads the platforms to raise their subscription price for sellers compared to the case of full competition. However, as sellers become more valuable under coopetition and buyers exert a positive cross-group network effect on sellers, the competition for buyers is intensified, which leads to a lower price for buyers under coopetition than under competition. Coopetition can increase total surplus compared to full competition if additional participants on the singlehoming side join the market.

Chat Pay, the mobile payment services of Alibaba and Tencent, has increased significantly in China. This success raises three questions: (i) why did the service providers not decide to compete to achieve client exclusivity? (ii) Why was the installed base of the incumbent, Alipay, not a barrier to the entrant's success? (iii) Why did the entry of WeChat Pay accelerate diffusion of the incumbent's solution? This paper proposes a model of adoption which encapsulates the distinctive features of the two service providers. It suggests that the complementarities between the two solutions (differentiated services offered to clients, decreasing adoption costs, and contrasting business models) may explain the interests of the service providers in avoiding strong competition. During the adoption phase, it was in the interests of both Alipay and WeChat to develop their different products, as any technological improvements introduced by these operators increased the benefits of both. However, this strategic complementarity effect now risks decreasing their incentives to innovate.

A bug bounty program, also known as a Vulnerability Research Program (VRP), is a form of crowdsourcing increasingly used by companies to improve their system security. It involves offering monetary rewards to individuals that find new security flaws in a piece of software or a system. One of the key challenges in the design of such contests is to attract enough participants of a high standard. In this paper, we study how hackers' perception of the uncertainty of obtaining a reward, determined by the level of information a contest provides about the contractual terms, affects the outcome of the contest both quantitatively (the number of participations) and qualitatively (participant skill and experience). Specifically, we examine how a hacker's choice to participate in a VRP depends on this level of information. Using an unbalanced panel data set on 156 bug bounty programs run on a well-known bug bounty platform, we find that a more detailed contest policy and in particular more information about the compensation scheme attracts a greater number of participants. On the contrary, providing less detail induces less participation but attracts more skilled and more experienced hackers. Hackers self-select whether to participate in a VRP according to the level of information about the contest's contractual terms, which leads to a trade-off between inducing higher rates of participation and attracting more valuable participants.

Digital technology, through service innovations and the widespread use of social media, has influenced the quality of information goods. This is the case of cultural goods in general and journalistic information in particular. Yet, there is no consensual definition of quality and its measurement. In the literature, this notion often refers to different concepts and social expectations. This article proposes to use the economic model of vertical and horizontal differentiation to analyze the quality of journalistic information. Our study relies on the linguistic methods of discourse analysis to characterize the editorial choices of news producers. By comparing 93,000 press articles on 31 events between 2015 and 2019 and published by 55 representative news producers in France, we provide a mapping of the French media according to their choices of differentiation, and we assess, on this basis, the quality of journalistic information available on the market.

This study aims to assess behavioral changes in transportation habits induced by real-time and multimodal information provided by a mobile application, SmartMoov. The users of SmartMoov (beta-testers) were selected on a voluntary basis. After three months of testing the mobile application in a living lab in Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, we analyzed the beta-testers' feelings and changes in transportation behavior. Although the beta-testers represented a unique population segment, econometric modeling shows that they were sensitive to the information provided by the application and used it to modify their mobility behavior. They were more likely to change their route and departure time than their transportation mode. While the average travel time and the safety margin affected overall mobility changes (i.e., mode, route, and departure time), there were additional factors that influenced changes in the route and departure time. Specifically, a gender effect was documented in the choice of departure time.

This article investigates the links between privacy experience, privacy perception, political ideology, and online privacy concern associated with data collection. We used data collected in 2010 from more than 14,000 internet users from 26 European countries. Our results show that there are several (individual, contextual, and macro) aspects that simultaneously affect concern over online privacy. In the present article, we show that individuals who have experienced invasions of their privacy in the past are not those who are most concerned about privacy. An important source of concern over online privacy seems to stem from knowledge of an acquaintance's bad experience combined with personal bad experience. Hearing about online privacy issues from acquaintances or via the media is also associated with heightened concern over privacy. Our results also show that individuals on the far left and those with a broad privacy perception are those who are most concerned.