Seth Benzell: What should government do about digital platforms like Facebook?

Join us for a talk by Seth Benzell, a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. He will be presenting his recent research on digital platforms such as Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber. Together with his co-author Avinash Collis, they discuss a variety of possible government policies toward such companies, from taxation, to compensation of their data-generating users ("data as labor"), to outright nationalization. In particular they evaluate those options in terms of their impact on the consumer surplus of digital platforms.