Research shows that digital divides and inequalities are related to lower socioeconomic status and detrimental to social and economic capital acquisition. Other studies show that use of information and communication technologies in the classroom can lead to worse academic performance. Nevertheless, many universities require that students own or buy a laptop, and many offer financial aid for students who cannot afford to buy one. As such, laptop ownership may be crucially tied to academic performance. Based on a large data set of incoming freshmen at a large public university in the United States, this article shows that not owning a laptop is negatively associated with overall college performance, even when controlling for socioeconomic background. Whereas we find that laptop ownership is not necessarily responsible for the higher performance of individuals in our broader sample, it could be beneficial to nonowners, which has implications for university policies seeking to provide institution-wide access to laptops and for universities’ broader interactions with students who do not own a laptop.

We study zero-rating, a practice whereby an Internet service provider (ISP) that limits retail data consumption exempts certain content from that limit. This practice is particularly controversial when an ISP zero-rates its own vertically integrated content, because the data limit and ensuing overage charges impose an additional cost on rival content. We find that zero-rating and vertical integration are complementary in improving social welfare, though potentially at the expense of lower profit to an unaffiliated content provider. Moreover, allowing content providers to pay for zero-rating via a sponsored data plan raises welfare by inducing the ISP to zero-rate more content.

Using a model of sequential search, we show that announcements to price-match raise prices by altering consumer search behavior. First, price-matching diminishes firms incentives to lower prices to attract consumers who have no search costs. Second, for consumers with positive search costs, price-matching lowers the marginal benefit of search, inducing them to accept higher prices. Finally, price-matching can lead to asymmetric equilibria where one firm runs fewer sales and both firms tend to offer smaller discounts than in a symmetric equilibrium. Price increases grow in the proportion of consumers who invoke price-matching guarantees and in the level of equilibrium asymmetry.

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