CONCEPT
GDP-B
Brynjolfsson's proposed supplement to traditional GDP that captures the <em>consumer benefit</em> from free digital goods — demonstrating through choice experiments that services the standard metric values at zero are worth thousands of dollars per person annually.
GDP-B is a measurement framework Brynjolfsson developed with collaborators including Avinash Collis, Erwin Diewert, Felix Eggers, and Kevin Fox to capture the welfare value generated by free digital goods that conventional GDP records as contributing nothing to the economy. Through incentive-compatible choice experiments — offering participants real money to give up access to digital services — Brynjolfsson's team estimated that the median American would require over $17,000 per year to give up search engines alone. Facebook, email, maps, Wikipedia, and other free services carried similar consumer valuations. Because GDP measures output at market prices and these services have market prices of zero, their enormous welfare contribution is entirely invisible in national accounts. GDP-B proposed adjusting the framework to capture this consumer benefit — a reform whose urgency increased as AI tools expanded the category of valuable services provided outside traditional market pricing.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The methodology of choice experiments addresses a classic measurement problem: how do you