American Economic Review · 2025 · Leonardo Bursztyn、Benjamin Handel、Rafael Jiménez-Durán、Christopher G. Roth
中文摘要
个人可能因不消费某种流行产品而产生负效用。由于存在这种针对非用户的外部性，将总消费量视为给定的标准消费者剩余衡量方法无法恰当地捕捉消费者福利。我们提出一种将这些外部性纳入考量的方法，并将其用于估计两个社交媒体平台——TikTok 和 Instagram——带来的消费者福利。针对大学生开展的激励性实验表明，按照标准衡量方法，福利为正；但将这些非用户外部性纳入考量后，福利为负。我们的研究结果凸显了产品市场陷阱的存在：平台的活跃用户宁愿该平台并不存在。（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)