Platform companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon are the giants of the post-industrial age. They are replacing the physical artefacts of media, transforming business models and challenging bricks and mortar retail establishments. These large-scale changes have negative as well as positive consequences and they are creating challenges for policy makers. The new ordering of markets is likely a first step in the use of data these companies are accumulating about preferences, social interconnections, and behaviours. Speaking to these themes in their new book Advanced Introduction to Platform Economics(Edward Elgar, 2020), Prof. Mansell and Prof. Steinmueller will be discussing how different economic lenses defend or advance policy reform.
Platform Economics: Possible Futures from Quello Center on Vimeo.
Robin Mansell is a Professor of New Media and the Internet in the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, Board member and Secretary of TPRC, and past President IAMCR. Her research focuses on technology innovation, digital platform governance and its socio-political and economic consequences.
W. Edward Steinmueller is the R.M. Phillips Professor of the Economics of Innovation, Science Policy Research Unit, at the University of Sussex, UK. Steinmueller’s current areas of research include the role of digital technologies in fundamental social and economic transformations such as the 4th industrial revolution, the reshaping of science and technology policy to address social needs and grand challenges, and the production, adoption and socio-economic consequences of Internet-related technologies.
