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I have posted a draft of a new article, An Economic Model of Intermediary Liability . It’s a collaboration with Pengfei Zhang , who I met when he was a graduate student in economics at Cornell, and is now a professor at UT Dallas. He was studying the economics of content takedowns, and participated in my content-moderation reading group. We fell to talking about how to model different intermediary liability regimes, and after a lot of whiteboard diagrams, this paper was the result. I presented it at the Ber
I’m excited about this work for two reasons. First, I think we have developed a model that hits the sweet spot between elegance and expressiveness. It has only a small number of moving parts, but the model demonstrates off all of the standard tropes of the debates around intermediary liability: collateral censorship, the moderator’s dilemma, the tradeoffs between over- and under-moderation, and more. It can describe a wide range of liability regimes, and should be a useful foundation for future economic ana
Here is the abstract: