Prof. Joel Waldfogel
Prof. Joel Waldfogel
Digital Economy
Joel Waldfogel is a Research Associate at ZEW. He works in close cooperation with ZEW’S Research Unit “Digital Economy”.
He is furthermore the Associate Dean for MS and MBA Programs, the Frederick R. Kappel Chair in Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Before coming to Carlson, Waldfogel worked at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (1997–2010), where he was the Ehrenkranz Family Professor of Business and Public Policy and served as department chair and associate vice dean. Between 1990 and 1997, he was an assistant and later an associate professor of economics at Yale University.
Waldfogel’s main research interests are industrial organization and law and economics. He has conducted empirical studies into price advertising, media markets, the operation of differentiated product markets, and issues related to digital products, including piracy, pricing, revenue sharing, and the effects of digitization on the supply of new products. Most of his research since 2004 has focused on copyright-related issues. He has published papers on the impact of piracy on the revenue of authorized products in recorded music, motion pictures, and television. Since 2010 he has conducted research and published papers on the broader impacts of digitization on the supply of new products in the creative industries.
He has published over 70 articles in scholarly outlets including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the RAND Journal of Economics. He has published three books, The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Harvard University Press, 2007), Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton University Press, 2009), as well as Digital Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2018). He has also written for Slate. Waldfogel is co-editor of the 2015 Handbook of Media Economics as well as the 2012 Oxford Handbook of the Digital Economy. He received an A.B. in economics from Brandeis University in 1984 and a PhD in economics from Stanford University in 1990.
