当产品市场成为集体陷阱: 以社交媒体为例
When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media
American Economic Review · 2025 · [{"name": "Leonardo Bursztyn", "affiliation": ["University of Chicago"]}, {"name": "Benjamin Handel", "affiliation": ["University of California, Berkeley"]}, {"name": "Rafael Jiménez-Durán", "affiliation": ["Bocconi University"]}, {"name": "Christopher G. Roth", "affiliation": ["Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics"]}]
中文摘要
个体可能因未消费某种流行产品而产生负效用。鉴于这种针对非使用者的外部性，将总消费量视为给定的标准消费者剩余度量无法恰当地刻画消费者福利。我们提出一种核算这些外部性的方法，并将其应用于估计两个社交媒体平台——TikTok和Instagram——所带来的消费者福利。针对大学生开展的激励实验表明，基于标准度量福利为正，但在计入这些非使用者外部性后福利转为负。我们的发现凸显了产品市场陷阱的存在，即该平台的活跃用户希望该平台不存在。(JEL D62, D83, D91, L82, Z13)
Abstract
Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. With such externalities to nonusers, standard consumer surplus measures, which take aggregate consumption as given, fail to appropriately capture consumer welfare. We propose an approach to account for these externalities and apply it to estimate consumer welfare from two social media platforms: TikTok and Instagram. Incentivized experiments with college students indicate positive welfare based on the standard measure but negative welfare when accounting for these nonuser externalities. Our findings high-light the existence of product market traps, where active users of a platform prefer it not to exist. (JEL D62, D83, D91, L82, Z13)