The Abstract: Restricting Access to Books on the Web

A roundup of recent research:

Unanticipated Effects of U.S. Copyright Legislation
Paul David of Stanford and Jared Rubin of California State University, Fullerton

"We find that by 2027, changes in copyright laws over the last half-century will have prevented over 3.5 million books that would otherwise have entered the public domain from doing so. Of the four major laws in question, the two most responsible for this phenomenon are the 1976 and 1992 Acts, both of which eliminated the copyright renewal requirement. These findings provide empirical support for the claims of copyright law specialists...who argue that the renewal requirement which Congress discarded provides an important safeguard for an ample and growing public domain. On the other hand, the 1962 and 1998 Acts, by extending the renewal period, have decreased the total amount of books clearly not in the public domain. By 2027, these two laws will have prevented over 2.3 million books from clearly being in the public domain -- and thus unavailable for digitalization by Google and the OCA without the possibility of copyright infringement."

Improving User-Generated Product Reviews
Anindya Ghose and Panagiotis Ipeirotis of New York University

"With the rapid growth of the Internet, the ability of users to create and publish content has created active electronic communities that provide a wealth of product information. However, the high volume of reviews that are typically published for a single product makes it harder for individuals as well as manufacturers to locate the best reviews and understand the true underlying quality of a product. In this paper, we re-examine the impact of reviews on economic outcomes like product sales and see how different factors affect social outcomes like the extent of their perceived usefulness. Our econometric analysis reveals that the extent of subjectivity, informativeness, readability, and linguistic correctness in reviews matters in influencing sales and perceived usefulness. Reviews that have a mixture of objective, and highly subjective sentences have a negative effect on product sales, compared to reviews that tend to include only subjective or only objective information. However, such reviews are considered more informative (or helpful) by the users...we show that we can accurately predict the impact of reviews on sales and their perceived usefulness...We examine the relative importance of the three broad feature categories: 'reviewer-related' features, 'review subjectivity' features, and'review readability' features, and find that using any of the three feature sets results in a statistically equivalent performance as in the case of using all available features. Based on our findings, we can identify quickly reviews that are expected to be helpful to the users, and display them first, improving significantly the usefulness of the reviewing mechanism to the users of the electronic marketplace."

Public or Private Production of Food Safety: What Do U.S. Consumers Want?
V. Kerry Smith of Arizona State University, Carol Mansfield of RTI International, and Aaron Strong

"This paper reports estimates of consumers' preferences for plans to improve food safety. The plans are distinguished based on whether they address the ex ante risk of food borne illness or the ex post effects of the illness. They are also distinguished based on whether they focus on a public good -- reducing risk of illness for all consumers or allowing individual households to reduce their private risks of contracting a food borne pathogen. Based on a National Survey conducted in 2007 using the Knowledge Network internet panel our findings indicate consumers favor ex ante risk reductions and are willing to pay approximately $250 annually to reduce the risk of food borne illness. Moreover, they prefer private to public approaches and would not support efforts to reduce the severity of cases of illness over risk reductions. "