The Innovation and Regulation Chair of Digital Services organized its 10th conference on Digital Economics (previously the Conference on the Economics of Information and Communication Technologies) last April 6 and 7, 2018. This conference brought together about fifty digital economy researchers from different countries. The quality of the work presented, both theoretical and empirical, has been remarkable. A wide variety of topics were discussed: platform economics, broadband economy, innovation, the economic impact of big data, privacy, social networks, etc.
The two keynote speakers this year were Neil Gandal from Tel Aviv University and Markus Reisinger from the University of Frankfurt. Neil Gandal presented empirical research that seeks to quantify the importance of networks among innovators in the diffusion of technological knowledge. Markus Reisinger presented theoretical research on the impact that price personalization (enabled by access to large amounts of data) can have on producers’ distribution choices (own distribution network vs downstream external distribution network).