报告题目：The Economics of Password Sharing
报告人：Jianqing Chen教授
举办时间：2024年6月6日9：30-11：30
举办地点：A南302教室
报告人简介：
Jianqing Chen is an Ashbel Smith Professor in Information Systems at the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his Ph.D. from McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. His general research interests are in platform business models, economic impact of AI, social media and user-generated content, search engine advertising, and economics of information systems. His papers have been published in academic journals, including Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Production and Operations Management. He received ISS Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award of INFORMs in 2016. He was the co-recipient of the Best Paper award for the Fifteenth Conference on Information Systems and Technology in 2010 and of the Best Paper award for the First, Sixth, and Ninth China Summer Workshop on Information Management in 2007, 2012, and 2015. He received the Outstanding Associate Editor award for Year 2019 at Information Systems Research. He also received the Best Associate Editor award for International Conference on Information Systems in 2021 and 2022. He co-chaired CSWIM 2016, co-chaired E-Business Cluster of INFORMs in 2013, co-chaired Information Systems Cluster of INFORMs in 2014, and served as the president of INFORMS E-Business Section in 2020. He is currently an Associate Editor of Information Systems Research and a Senior Editor of Production and Operations Management.
报告内容：
Password sharing has been commonly observed across different industries, including in music services, online education, software services, and the recent notable streaming services from Netflix. We develop a game-theoretic model to examine the effect of consumer password sharing on a firm’s pricing and profit. We consider that some consumers might share passwords at some inconvenience cost (e.g., privacy costs). We find that, compared to the scenario where consumers cannot share passwords, the firm’s optimal price in the presence of password sharing could be higher or lower. When the password-sharing cost is low, the firm optimally sets a higher price because the valuations of consumers who share passwords are aggregated into a higher total valuation, leading to a higher average valuation among consumers. In contrast, when the password-sharing cost is high, the firm switches to charging a lower equilibrium price to reduce consumers' incentives to share passwords. Our results suggest that password sharing does not always hurt the firm—compared to the scenario where consumers cannot share passwords, the firm can even benefit from consumers’ password sharing when the sharing cost is relatively low. Furthermore, we examine the implications of password sharing on consumption volume, consumer surplus, and social welfare. We find that password sharing boosts consumption volume to a large extent. Surprisingly, social welfare and consumer surplus decrease with password sharing when the sharing cost is neither too low nor too high.
