Joshua Gans

Avi Goldfarb

Ajay Agrawal

Catherine E. Tucker

An authoritative look at how artificial intelligence both shapes and is shaped by the political and economic forces of the modern world. As the effects of artificial intelligence are felt across economies and societies, many of its ramifications are still emerging. This volume brings together economists and political scientists to examine how AI intersects with regulation, military power, and political identity—offering analytical frameworks and identifying key open questions for future research. The contributions address topics such as the allocation of property rights for AI inputs, trade-offs among alternative regulatory regimes, and the role of interest groups in shaping the technology’s trajectory. They explore how AI-related capabilities influence military effectiveness, resource allocation, and bargaining power among nations, and consider AI’s effects on political preferences, from the influence of AI-curated information on polarization to the implications of targeted political advertising and personalized education for national identity formation. The volume highlights key trade-offs that arise in AI’s political economy, and points toward empirical strategies and theoretical models that can advance understanding in this emerging field. Drawing on diverse disciplinary perspectives, the collection provides a foundation for rigorous inquiry into how AI both shapes and is shaped by political and economic forces.

The Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence

Shane M. Greenstein

There is a small and growing literature that explores the impact of digitization in a variety of contexts, but its economic consequences, surprisingly, remain poorly understood. This volume aims to set the agenda for research in the economics of digitization, with each chapter identifying a promising area of research. Economics of Digitizationidentifies urgent topics with research already underway that warrant further exploration from economists. In addition to the growing importance of digitization itself, digital technologies have some features that suggest that many well-studied economic models may not apply and, indeed, so many aspects of the digital economy throw normal economics in a loop.Economics of Digitization will be one of the first to focus on the economic implications of digitization and to bring together leading scholars in the economics of digitization to explore emerging research.

Catherine E. Tucker

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