When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media
研究发现，不消费流行产品可能带来负效用，考虑这种非用户外部性后，TikTok和Instagram的消费者福利从正转负，揭示了产品市场陷阱的存在。
Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. With such externalities to nonusers, standard consumer surplus measures, which take aggregate consumption as given, fail to appropriately capture consumer welfare. We propose an approach to account for these externalities and apply it to estimate consumer welfare from two social media platforms: TikTok and Instagram. Incentivized experiments with college students indicate positive welfare based on the standard measure but negative welfare when accounting for these nonuser externalities. Our findings high-light the existence of product market traps, where active users of a platform prefer it not to exist.