IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wrk/warwec/551.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Penny for your Thoughts: E-Mail and the Under-Valuation of Expert Time

Author

Listed:
  • Willmore, C.

Abstract

The cost incurred by the sender of an e-mail does not reflect the costs to the recipient, leading to a larger number of messages being sent than is optimal for the general welfare. As a solution, we suggest a per-message e-mail tax on the sender similar to that proposed by Shiman (1996), with the addition of a recipient-determined 'contact list'. The recipient derives utility from messages sent by those on this list, and they are not to be taxed when sending messages to the recipient. We recommend that the tax revenue be divided between a regulating body and the e-mail recipient's Internet service provider.

Suggested Citation

  • Willmore, C., 1999. "A Penny for your Thoughts: E-Mail and the Under-Valuation of Expert Time," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 551, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:wrk:warwec:551
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/2008/twerp551.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Simon P. Anderson & André De Palma, 2009. "Information congestion," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 40(4), pages 688-709, December.
    2. Simon P. Anderson & André de Palma, 2007. "Information Congestion: open access in a two-sided market," THEMA Working Papers 2007-10, THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    COSTS ; TAXATION ; INTERNET;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H20 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - General
    • L86 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Information and Internet Services; Computer Software
    • L63 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Manufacturing - - - Microelectronics; Computers; Communications Equipment
    • L96 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Telecommunications

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wrk:warwec:551. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Margaret Nash (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dewaruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.