Austan Goolsbee Quotes

In the U.S., PC-makers have no incentive to lower prices because it kills their profit margins. They keep adding new features like high-end retina displays and faster processors to justify their high prices.

With less competition to fear, companies are emboldened to raise their mark-ups and profits. That lifts share prices and thus the wealth of already wealthy shareholders.

Two-sided markets are notoriously finicky.

It's not about revenues: The fundamental economics in digital business is scale and margins. The top line has become the bottom line.

The tension between centrality, on the one hand, and competition, on the other, is probably the oldest of all market structure issues.

Higher ebook prices only benefit one group: publishers.

When I first started doing work on how the Internet is affecting commerce, like a lot of people, I was really excited by this nearly perfect market.

They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.

It's no longer the older paradigm of, 'I want to own this market, and no one else can own this market because I own this market.' The Internet has made the market limitless.

What is “destructive competition” for producers is a bargain bonanza for consumers.

Wal-Mart uses technology to increase sales volume, but the more it does so, the more it drives down profit margins - its own and everybody else's. The same logic does not appear to hold for Goldman Sachs.

Vigilant and effective antitrust enforcement today is preferable to the heavy hand of government regulation of the Internet tomorrow.

I think the Internet is absolutely extraordinary. It's very, very useful and I think one of the things we've got to do is make sure that the African continent gets on to that information super highway.

We must speed up the deployment of broadband in order to bring high-speed data services to homes and businesses. The spread of information technology has contributed to a steady growth in U.S. productivity.

The Internet creates as well as destroys. Social networks, search advertising, and cloud computing are multibillion dollar industries that didn't exist 10 years ago. They are products of the same force that has rendered the Postal Service's core business obsolete.

Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims.

India's prosperity is sectioned by geography, such as in Bangalore, where the information technology industry is prominent. Because they have a conduit out of India, competing in the world by the Internet, it's not regulated in corrupt ways, and it is very prosperous.

E-commerce is applicable to Russia, just as it's applicable to any other market.

In industries where a lot of competitors are selling the same product - mangoes, gasoline, DVD players - price is the easiest way to distinguish yourself. The hope is that if you cut prices enough you can increase your market share, and even your profits. But this works only if your competitors won't, or can't, follow suit.

The Internet doesn't change everything. It doesn't change supply and demand.

There's no locality on the web - every market is a global market.

The Internet produces new business models and also reinvents traditional business models.

A variety of national and international studies indicate that the broad-based deployment of information technology can have a substantial impact on our nation's economic productivity and growth as well as the educational and social success of our citizens.

When an entrant competitor attacks the low end of any market, the rational reaction of the incumbent firms is to abandon rather than defend it - because the low end is the least profitable of their possible investments.

We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference.