Collaborative Research: An Empirical Study of Broadband Internet Service

协作研究：宽带互联网服务的实证研究

• 批准号: 1324717
• 负责人: Jonathan Williams
• 金额: $ 35.03万
• 依托单位: University of Georgia Research Foundation Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-09-15 至 2015-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1324717&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Empirical; Study; Broadband

Broadband internet access is now widespread; there about 210 million users in the United States, up from roughly eight million in 2000. These users spend an average of 30 hours a month using the Internet, up from just one hour per month in 1995. Surprisingly little is known about the fundamentals of demand for internet access, such as the willingness-to-pay per gigabyte of data or the importance of externalities created by network congestions. A key reason for this gap is the lack of detailed data on broadband useage.This project studies pricing and usage of broadband service using a unique data set of subscriber-level service plans and hourly usage from a group of North American internet service providers. The research team will produce descriptive statistics on broadband usage, estimate demand and willingness-to-pay for broadband access, evaluation the welfare implications of usage based pricing, and analyze the impact of network congestion on demand. The results will allow the PI team to evaluate the possible effects of congestion pricing in this market. The PI team will use both the detailed data and variation in the shadow price created by the usage-based pricing used by some providers to estimate demand. The demand estimates are then used to compute the effects of usage based pricing on consumer welfare. Furthermore, by exploiting exogenous variation in the configuration of the network the team can estimate the impact of congestion on both usage and welfare. This allows them to compute the equilibrium effect of congestion pricing.The results of this research form an important window on internet pricing and usage that sheds new light on recent policy debates on regulation of the internet.

宽带Internet访问现在已广泛；在美国，大约有2.1亿用户，高于2000年的大约800万用户。这些用户平均每月花费30个小时的时间使用互联网，高于1995年的每月一个小时。令人惊讶的是，对互联网访问的需求的基础知之甚少，例如，网络会议所创造的数据或外部活动的重要性。 这种差距的一个关键原因是缺乏有关宽带使用情况的详细数据。此项目研究的定价和使用宽带服务的使用，使用独特的订户级服务计划的数据集以及北美互联网服务提供商的订户级服务计划和小时使用。 研究团队将对宽带使用情况，估算需求和付费意愿进行描述性统计数据，评估基于使用情况的定价的福利含义，并分析网络拥塞对需求的影响。 结果将使PI团队能够评估该市场中拥堵定价的可能影响。 PI团队将使用一些提供商使用的基于用法的定价创建的详细数据和差异，以估算需求。 然后，使用需求估计来计算基于用法的定价对消费者福利的影响。 此外，通过利用网络配置中的外源性变化，团队可以估计交通拥堵对使用和福利的影响。 这使他们能够计算拥堵定价的均衡效应。这项研究的结果构成了互联网定价和用法的重要窗口，介绍了有关互联网调节的最新政策辩论。