Economists have written extensively on this question, often focusing on various types of incentive pay contracts aimed at eliciting greater effort from employees. This theoretical research identifies features of employment relationships that limit the effectiveness of simple piece-rate incentive pay plans and that force managers to consider other forms of incentive pay. In addition, managers introduce other human resource management practices, concerning employee training, hiring criteria, teamwork, job design, and employee hierarchies, that are aimed at eliciting optimal performance (see reviews in Gibbons, 1998; Gibbons and Waldman, 1999; Lazear, 1999; Murphy, 1999; and Prendergast, 1999). Still, without empirical evidence on businesses ’ human resource practices, it will remain an open question whether the theories proposed in “personnel economics [are] real or merely a series of clever models proposed by abstract thinkers who have little contact with reality ” (Lazear, 1999). In this study, we describe a new research approach – an approach we label “insider econometrics ” – that is aimed at producing empirical estimates of the value of alternative human resource management practices. This “insider ” approach goes deep

This chapter analyzes the rapid diffusion of the Internet across the United States over the past decade for both households and firms. We put the Internet’s diffusion into the context of economic diffusion theory where we consider costs and benefits on the demand and supply side. We also discuss several pictures of the Internet’s current physical presence using some of the main techniques for Internet measurement to date. We highlight different economic perspectives and explanations for the digital divide, that is, unequal availability and use of the Internet.

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Although in the popular imagination the Internet remains a diffuse cloud, in practical terms those who use e-mail and surf the web do so through the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) through which they gain access (Blumenthal and Clark 1997). As the proportion of our communicative and informational lives conducted on-line steadily grows, the reality of ISPs as determinants of the conditions under which communicative activity takes place is transforming the de facto communication law environment. The abandonment of traditional First Amendment rights and forced transfer of the intellectual property rights of individuals to ISPs so far occur beneath the radar in contracts unread and lawsuits scattered throughout topic-specific analyses. It has always been the case that any constitutional right—including those of the First Amendment—can be voluntarily yielded by contract. Historically, however, only occasionally were rights were so affected, few or only single rights were thus yielded up, and the contexts in which such a decision was made were those in which it was possible to make a choice among alternatives. In contrast, the contractually generated speech environment of ISPs restricts the rights of almost everyone and requires abandonment of a wide range of rights. As Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) and Terms of Service (TOSs) increasingly harmonize with each other across ISPs, these restrictions on rights take place in a context in which the vast majority of users cannot choose an alternative. The number of individuals who have found their speech constrained by ISPs is not known because there are no reporting requirements on ISPs