IGF 2014

When making decisions, policy makers, business leaders, and others often depend heavily upon economic assessments and models. But traditional economics is often unable to reflect the dynamic innovation enabled by the Internet. For example, old economic models assume that individuals and companies are motivated primarily by profit and can’t adequately explain innovation by collaborative, non-profit efforts such as open source software communities or the volunteer effort that created and maintains Wikipedia. The "sharing economy" and other, new economic paradigms are emerging fast and economists need new techniques and better data in order to track and understand them. New innovations such as the iPhone, which was launched in 2007, has enabled benefits that no economic model could have predicted. While new Internet and smartphone apps can be adopted by tens of millions of users in a few months, it often takes governments many years to adapt economic models and policies to new realities. New paradigms for economics and governance that can collect and analyze data in real time are called for. How can economists help develop new governance mechanisms that leverage Big Data and analytics? Policy makers and others who participate in this panel will learn more about leading-edge economic research that could help them better understand the impact and evolution of technology. Economists who attend will learn more about how policy makers are grappling with challenges related to Internet governance, Internet policy, and the evolution of the Internet and how they could benefit from better economic analysis.