Digital revolution is leaving economists scratching their heads

There should be a law against holding election campaigns while people are trying to enjoy their Easter break. So let’s forget politics and think about the strange ways the economy is changing as the old industrial era gives way to the post-industrial, digital era.

The revolution in information and communications technology is working its way through the economy, changing the way it works. The markets for digital products now work very differently from the markets for conventional products.

So a growing part of the economy consists of markets that don’t fit the assumptions economists make in their basic model of markets, as Diane Coyle, an economics professor at Cambridge University, explains in her book, Cogs and Monsters.

And the way we measure the industrial economy – using the “national accounts” and gross domestic product – isn’t designed to capture the new range of benefits that flow from digital markets.

Starting at the beginning, the great attraction of the capitalist, market economy is its almost magical ability to increase its productivity – its ability to produce an increased quantity of goods and services from an unchanged quantity of raw materials, capital equipment and human labour.

It’s this increased productivity – not so much the increase in resources used – that explains most of the improvement in our standard of living over the past two centuries.

Where did the greater productivity come from? From advances in technology. From bigger and better machines, and more efficiently organised factories, mines, farms, offices and shops, not to mention better educated and skilled workers.

Particularly in the past 70 years, we benefited hugely from the advent of mass-produced consumer goods on production lines. Economists call this “economies of scale” – the bigger the factory and the more you could produce, the lower the cost of each item.

Although each extra unit produced added marginally to raw material and labour costs, the more you produced, the more the “fixed cost” of building and equipping the factory was averaged over a larger number of items, thus reducing the “average cost” per item.

Decades of exploiting the benefit of economies of scale explain why so many of our industries are dominated by just a few big firms.

But the new economy of digital production has put scale economies on steroids. Coyle says software – and movies, news mastheads and much, much else – is costly to write (high fixed cost) but virtually costless to reproduce and distribute (no marginal cost).

So, production of digital products involves “increasing returns to scale”, which is good news for both producers and consumers - everyone except economists because their standard model assumes returns are either constant or declining.

But another thing that makes the digital economy different is “network effects”, starting with the greatest network, the network of networks, the internet. The basic network effect is that the more users of the network there are, the greater the benefit to the individual user. More increasing returns to scale.

Then, Coyle says, there are indirect network effects. Many digital markets involve “matching” suppliers with consumers – such as Airbnb, Uber and Amazon Marketplace. For consumers, the more suppliers the network attracts, the better the chance of quickly finding what you want. But, equally, for suppliers, the more customers the network attracts, the easier it is to make a sale. Economists call these digital networks “two-sided platforms”. The owner of the platform sits in the middle, dealing with both sides.

So, yet more benefits from bigness. And that’s before you get to the benefits of building, mining and sharing large collections of data.

All these benefits being so great, it’s not hard to see why you could end up with only a couple – maybe just one – giant network dominating a market. Welcome to the world of Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.

In their forthcoming book, From Free to Fair Markets, Richard Holden, an economics professor at the University of NSW, and Rosalind Dixon, a law professor at the same place, note that a number of leading lights have proposed breaking up these huge tech companies, in the same way America’s big telephone monopoly and interlocking oil companies were broken up last century.

But, the authors object, in most of these markets the power of these giants stems from the “network externalities” we’ve just discussed.

“Unlike traditional markets, when the source of market power is also the source of consumer harm, in these markets the source of market power is also what consumers (and producers, in the case of two-sided platforms) value – being connected with other consumers and producers,” they write.

“The key driver of the value that these firms create is precisely the network externalities that they bring about. Facebook is valuable to users because lots of other users are on Facebook . . .

“Google is a superior search engine because in performing so many searches, machine learning allows its algorithm to get better and better, making it a more desirable search engine.”

So, the driving force that leads to these markets having one dominant player is also the force that creates economic value. “Breaking up the large players will stop there being just a few large players, but it will also stop there being nearly as much economic value created,” they say.

Research by Holden, Professor Luis Rayo and the Nobel laureate Robert Akerlof has found that markets with network externalities tend to have three features. First, the firm that wins the initial competition in the market ends up with most of the market.

Second, it’s difficult to become a winning firm, and success is fragile. For instance, Microsoft has had little success getting its search engine Bing to take business from Google. And Netscape was once dominant in the browser market, but suddenly got supplanted.

Third, winners can’t go to sleep. They must constantly innovate and seek to raise their quality.

This makes the tech markets quite different from conventional markets like oil or even old-style networks like railways.

Economists’ efforts to get a handle on the new economy continue.

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Micro reform: what Treasury wants to change

Under its newish secretary, John Fraser, Treasury has a new slogan. It is proud to be "fiscally conservative, market-oriented and reform-driven". So just what reform does Treasury advocate?

Well, in a speech last week Fraser spelt it out. But first he noted that the key element of market-oriented reform is that it almost always involves heightening competition. He illustrated the point by summarising what happened during the golden age of micro-economic reform in the 1980s and '90s.

When business speaks of the need for Australian firms to be more competitive, it usually means  the government should do something that makes it easier for firms to compete with their foreign rivals.

But this is the opposite of what economists mean when they see heightened competition as the key driver of improved economic performance. They mean Australian firms should be forced to improve their own performance by exposing them to greater competition with other Aussie firms and by making it easier for foreign firms to compete with them.

As Fraser explains, competition is at the heart of how market economies are organised. "Competitive markets generally deliver benefits for all Australians in a way that sheltered markets fail to do so," he says.

"Effective competition in our economy is a key part of its strength and dynamism. Competitive markets benefit consumers by putting downward pressure on prices.

"And over time, competitive pressures drive innovation and investment in new technologies and the development of new products and quality services that meet the needs of consumers. This process of innovation is what drives economic growth and improvements in living standards in the long term."

The modern era of opening Australia to greater pressure from the world economy began when Gough Whitlam cut import tariffs in 1973, he says.

Successive tariff cuts in the '80s and '90s "put Australian manufacturing under increased competitive pressure but, behind the border, changes gave manufacturers flexibility to respond".

Significant among these changes were financial market deregulation and the move to enterprise bargaining, as well as the oft-forgotten reductions to the top personal marginal tax rate from a 60 per cent in 1985-86, to 47 per cent in 1990-91, Fraser says.

The process of reform culminated with the agreement across all levels of government to form the "national competition policy" that began in 1995 and ran through to 2005.

Government businesses were restructured to make them more commercially focused. The electricity, gas, water and rail sectors were transformed.

Legislation was reviewed so it enhanced rather than restricted competition. And a national access regime was established for essential infrastructure. That is, the public or private owners of monopoly networks were obliged to make them available to competitors at reasonable prices.

"Where creativity was once stifled by regulation, competition in product and service markets drove management to change work practices. A liberalised financial sector and a sound macro-economic environment supported strong investment."

Fraser says this era of huge changes offers three lessons on how to get policy reforms accepted.

"First, it was a holistic set of structural reforms. This is important because winners and losers differed and all Australians benefited from at least some of these reforms.

Second, in order to achieve reform we built a political consensus and, more importantly, a community consensus that things had to change and that a delay would make matters worse.

Third, the business community – both large and small – was a big part of this changing culture.
"Managers, no longer distracted by currying [for] government protection, were better able to focus outwards on new markets and inwards on cost savings."

So what's on Treasury's latest reform to-do list? Tax reform, for one. Then there's the financial system. Australia's banking system is relatively concentrated by international standards and the Murray financial system inquiry recommended that regulators increase the emphasis on competition relative to their other objectives.

Then, labour market reform. "I am heartened by Peter Harris and the Productivity Commission's report on workplace relations. Genuine reform  ... can be expected to have positive effects on employment and productivity and to reduce business compliance costs."

Next, competition laws. "It is important that firms that have market power are not able to use that position to exclude competitors and potential competitors. This is why we have competition laws."

The review of competition  by Professor Ian Harper found that current  laws need to be overhauled to make them fit for purpose.

"There remain substantial restrictions on who can supply goods and services, including: professional licensing requirements, liquor and gambling regulation, media and broadcasting restrictions , and the well-known issues of pharmacies and taxis," Fraser says.

"There are restrictions on what can be supplied through product standards, agricultural marketing boards, parallel import restrictions and intellectual property protections. And restrictions on where and when supply can occur: air service agreements, retail trading hours restrictions, and planning and zoning rules."

Fraser concedes that the goal here should not always be deregulation. Regulations are often justified to pursue social goals. "But these goals should be approached through better regulation that doesn't have the side effect of curtailing competition.

"To my mind, foremost among this list, for immediate economic bang for the buck, is planning and zoning."

Planning and zoning systems may create excessive barriers to the entry of new businesses  by limiting  number and size of outlets and  types of business models permissible.

"In other areas, the challenge for governments is not so much to reform regulation as to make way for 'digital disruption'. Uber  connects passengers with drivers and AirBnB  connects travellers with spaces.

"We should welcome competition here too – governments should not be too quick to assume they will always be better regulators than the private sector."

Clearly, Fraser has an ambitious agenda. It's different to mine, but sometimes my duty is to make sure you know what the econocrats are thinking.

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Digital disruption: more pros than cons

Do you get the feeling we've got a government that's worrying about everything except getting on with governing? One issue that's not getting the attention it deserves is the rise of "digital disruption".

The pace at which the continuing revolution in information and communications technology is reshaping industries and occupations is remarkable.

As the consultants Deloitte Access Economics wrote in a report for Google, just a few years ago most consumers logged on to the internet to access email, search the web and do some online shopping. Most of us still accessed the internet using a computer.

"Today, digital technology including cloud platforms, smart hand-held devices and social networks are the new beachheads of the sweeping impacts of the internet," the report says.

"Rapidly evolving from basic connectivity, these technologies are further changing not only how consumers interact with businesses, but also how businesses are organising themselves."

We've seen the digital revolution change the way we buy and listen to music, read books, learn the news, shop, do our banking, pay bills and check in on flights. Its changes to the news media and banking and other financial services have a long way to run yet.

The digital revolution is about information in all its forms, how it's gathered, processed, accessed, transferred and stored. "Big data" is about how all this information is analysed to produce further information about how we behave.

This is why you don't have to be very brave to predict that digital-driven change will be affecting many more industries before it's through.

As the consultants say, while reaching new customers and responding to customer needs is a big reason for businesses to go online and to use social media, we're now seeing "transformational change" inside businesses as they take advantage of the efficiencies that advances in digital technology are making possible.

This means "cloud, data analytics and machine-to-machine technologies" emerging as a second big driver of change. (It also means you and me learning to live with a lot of high-sounding words we barely understand.)

And phones are taking over the world. "The rise in mobile access to the internet and digital services through smartphones and connected devices [I think that means iPads] has prompted new ways of thinking about presenting information to consumers on smaller screens and capitalising on usage trends."

Read your newspaper on a phone? Sure. Many people already do, and we're working to improve our offering as we speak.

Hip business people speak of digital disruption as though it's a wonderful thing. It will make the world a better, faster, easier place, so bring it on.

But that word "disruption" sounds more nasty than nice. So which is it to be?

Both. If new inventions take hold and spread it's because enough people really do think they're an improvement.

But that doesn't stop the industries and businesses most affected by the advance from being turned on their head and maybe even forced to close. So the benefits to customers usually come at a cost to many workers.

Some are redeployed, some become redundant. Most ejected workers eventually find a new job – even if it isn't always as good as the one they left – though some, particularly older people, may never get back on their feet.

But how far have we got with the digital revolution to date? Deloitte Access Economics has gathered what we know and done some rough figuring in a report for the Australian Computer Society.

The consultants say that, compared with other developed countries, Australia is a high-level user and adopter of information and communications technology, with comparatively high rates of mobile broadband penetration and business adoption of digital technology for commercial practices.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, for every 100 people in Oz there are about 114 subscriptions to mobile wireless broadband, more than any other country bar Finland.

Almost three-quarters of our businesses have a website and a very high 38 per cent of businesses actually make sales over the internet.

The OECD says our information technology specialists make up 3.6 per cent of our workforce, which puts us right behind the Nordic countries and North America. Using a broader definition, about 22 per cent of the workforce is in info-technology-intensive occupations.

The consultants' own estimates say about 300,000 info-tech workers are in the industry proper, with about another 300,000 in other professional and scientific service industries, public administration, financial services and various other industries. This amounts to 5 per cent of the workforce.

They estimate that the digital economy contributed almost $80 billion to gross domestic product in 2013-14, well up on their previous estimate in 2011 and about 5 per cent of the total economy.

But they identify two areas of weakness. First, the 10 per cent of our total annual spending on research and development that we devote to information and communications technology is way behind other developed economies, even small ones.

Second, demand for info-tech workers is expected to grow by 100,000 over the next six years, but Australian new graduates with info-tech qualifications have declined significantly since the early noughties.

More than 10,000 temporary skilled migrant 457 visas have been granted annually to info-tech workers in recent years. In 2013-14 it was closer to 20,000.

Really? This is the best we can do by our own young people? Surely we should be trying harder.

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How the econocrats can lift their game

When we judge the performance of chief executives, most of us know the boss who's good at cutting costs isn't worth as much as the boss who's also able to improve the outfit's products and processes. Well, the same goes for treasurers and finance ministers - and their econocrats.

It seems the fiscal managers are running low on good ideas. But not to worry - the former Treasury and prime ministerial adviser Dr Ric Simes, now of Deloitte Access Economics, had some useful advice to offer in a speech to the Australian Business Economists last week.

Simes argues governments themselves have an important role to play in achieving the improved productivity performance the econocrats keep saying we need. Especially when "productivity" is better thought of as "technological progress" and the figures for measured productivity aren't as important as actual improvements in welfare.

"For those parts of the economy where market forces are paramount, government's main role is to make sure that regulation or its own actions allow competition to unfold without unwarranted intervention," Simes says.

To me, this means econocrats should urge their masters to tread carefully when powerful business interests, fighting to shore up a technologically superseded business model, demand that governments make breaches of government-granted copyright a hanging offence.

As Simes says, digital technologies have lower entry barriers and are forcing businesses to be both more productive and more responsive to consumers. So don't help incumbents resist change.

But, he says, the potential for technology to make some of the largest improvements in Australian lives lies in government-heavy sectors including health, education and transport. In these areas, progress has been too gradual.

"The exemplar is probably electronic health records, which have been the focus of considerable effort for perhaps 15 years now, but where we still seem to be a long way off the goal of having them routinely used throughout the health system.

"Or, take even an example where we have done well, the SCATS - Sydney Co-ordinated Adaptive Traffic System - for control of traffic lights. SCATS was originally developed 40 years ago, it has been constantly refined since then and is now in use in 27 countries.

"So, a success story - yet, as a Sydney driver, I know my welfare would be improved with a more refined SCATS system. It's coming - NICTA [the National Information Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence] and others are working on optical-based monitoring and improved optimisation algorithms - but more support for both the research and especially its deployment would lift my welfare!"

Simes notes that in both cases, electronic health records and SCATS, the strict efficiency improvements from the technology - the bit that would help government budgets - represent a relatively small part of the overall benefits to the community.

"Especially in health and education, many of the benefits will involve improvements in the quality and range of services rather than efficiency gains," he says.

"Making the most effective use of digital technologies in health and education - as well as other areas where government has a direct role, such as smart technologies in transport and utilities - will deliver much larger economic and social benefits than where we seem to like to focus much of our policy attention, such as whether we should get the budget back into balance by 2017 or 2019."

Another potentially major area of micro-economic reform, Simes says, is how we organise our cities. Up to 80 per cent of Australia's output and employment occurs within its major cities. This has happened in the pursuit of economies of agglomeration.

"Yet we know that the problems are mounting. Congestion, compromised open spaces, the loss of amenity all risk detracting more and more from those benefits."

As with digital, many of the benefits from fixing these problems would not show up in our standard measures of welfare derived from the national accounts.

"Ten minutes less travelling time to work, or to school, doesn't have direct effects on gross domestic product. A more vibrant space around the harbour, or convenient shopping centre in the 'burbs, doesn't get picked up. But social welfare is clearly affected," he says.

Taking Sydney as an example, if commuter travel times on its roads were reduced by five minutes per trip, the benefits would amount to $3.6 billion a year, if an individual's time is valued at average weekly earnings.

To this you could add savings for freight or commercial vehicles. And savings for going to the shops, or school, or to the beach.

Echoing the patron saint of treasurers, Simes wants to lift our gaze to "the big picture".

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Digital revolution transforms productivity debate

A second former econocrat has joined former secretary of the Prime Minister's department Dr Mike Keating in seeking to lift the tone of the economic debate.

"We are spending too much effort debating how and how quickly we should bring the Commonwealth budget back into balance," Dr Ric Simes said in a speech to the Australian Business Economists this week.

"We need to elevate the economic debate from the level of catchcries about debt and deficits, or about productivity or even about the use of cost-benefit analyses. We need some deeper analyses being brought to the surface."

Simes, now a director of Deloitte Access Economics, formerly of Treasury and economic adviser to Paul Keating as prime minister, wants to see a more sensible discussion about productivity.
Productivity is obviously important and policy should indeed be focused on lifting it.

"But we do need to be careful about what this may mean in a particular circumstance," he said. One problem is that productivity is being used as a catchcry for myriad causes, often unjustifiably.

Simes agreed with Mike Keating's trenchant observation that "business associations, some leading employers and their camp followers in the media are insisting that future reforms must focus on alleged labour market rigidities and reductions in taxation, as if these were the most important influences on productivity".

And while "there is scope for improved labour relations to make a modest contribution to improved productivity ... the main responsibility for improvements in that regard lie with employers themselves," Keating has written.

"The best thing that employers and their trade associations could do is to stop passing the buck to everyone else for their own failings, and get on with making their workplaces more productive using the existing freedoms that they undoubtedly have," Keating concludes.

Simes adds that this is exactly what most businesses try to do. For his evidence, keep reading.

Simes' second problem with how "productivity" is being used in the debate concerns its measurement. "Productivity is simply a less than perfect measure of economic wellbeing, and having the public debate focus so much on what the Bureau of Statistics reports as productivity can be unhelpful."

Indeed, Professor John Quiggin, of the University of Queensland, had called productivity an "unhelpful concept", mainly because of problems with the way the contributions of labour and capital were measured in its calculation.

Simes agreed with Quiggin that we'd be better off using a term that was closely related to productivity, "technological progress" - that is, the introduction of technological innovations such as new products and improved production technologies.

Rhetoric - the choice of terms - did matter, Simes said, and had we been using the term technological progress instead of productivity, the debate wouldn't have been so open to distortion by vested interests.

"Tax, or industrial relations, or fiscal policy, can and should be refined, but they are not at the heart of why measured productivity weakened after 2000," he said.

But the measurement problem went further. "I think we have a fundamental problem in that our measures of gross domestic product or productivity are becoming less reliable proxies for economic welfare."

If instead of looking at productivity statistics we stand back and look at the way societies and businesses are changing, we find some profound changes under way, particularly the digital revolution.

We see consumers forcing retailers and media companies to transform. His own research had found that, without telework, only 14 per cent of new mums said they would return to work with their old employer, but 61 per cent said they would if telework was available.

His research had found how companies' information technology policies on staff use of social media at work and BYOD - bring your own device - were of growing importance in attracting young and talented employees.

He'd found that businesses able to create a "collaborative" working culture - including through use of digital technologies - succeeded in growing faster than otherwise.

What has this to do with productivity? First, most of the change we were seeing was being driven by individuals, whether they be consumers, workers, students or patients. To a trained economist, this should suggest that economic welfare had probably risen - and risen a lot.

It was hard not to conclude that individuals making deliberate decisions to do something new were adding to their own welfare, and to society's.

But, second, if this isn't showing up in our measures of welfare - such as GDP or productivity - then maybe there was something wrong with those measures. It seemed to Simes that "productivity, as measured, misses many, if not most, of the gains to consumer and social welfare that digital technology is delivering".

It didn't capture the benefits from improved convenience when we no longer had to queue for ages to renew a licence or at our bank branch. Nor the convenience of being able to search for a needed service in a fraction of the time it took before the internet.

It didn't capture the benefits of much greater choice. The Amazon books site, for instance, took costs out of the supply chain (thus reducing prices to consumers) but also provided much greater choice of books in a convenient manner.

Studies by Erik Brynjolfsson and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had estimated that the easy access to a greater choice of books generated seven to 10 times the consumer welfare that the more efficient supply chain generated (the only bit that would make it into measured productivity).

He wasn't saying we should include the benefits of convenience and choice in our measurement of GDP - that wouldn't work.

No. "What I am arguing is that we need to be careful to base policy decisions on a deeper understanding of our objectives and not be driven by simplistic rhetoric," he said.

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Abbott should repeal great big 'Australia tax'

When government changes hands, it s possible for important issues to fall between the cracks and useful work to be lost. In late July, a Labor-constituted parliamentary committee issued a report about the Australia tax . It drew a fair bit of media attention at the time but, coming so close to the election campaign, was soon forgotten.

But the report made some important recommendations recommendations the Coalition members of the committee were happy to support on measures the government could take to reduce the Australia tax and it s important the new government takes up those recommendations.

The report was an inquiry into the prices of information technology hardware and software sold in Australia, conducted by the House of Representatives standing committee on infrastructure and communications. It found, unsurprisingly, that Australian consumers and businesses must often pay much more for their IT products than their counterparts in comparable economies. Hence the term Australia tax .

Evidence presented to this inquiry left little doubt about the extent and depth of concern about IT pricing in Australia. Consumers are clearly perplexed, frustrated and angered by the experience of paying higher prices for IT products, the report says.

Submissions to the inquiry compared the prices of more than 150 professional software products and found an average price difference usually between Australian and US prices of 50 per cent. The median price difference was 46 per cent for Autodesk products, 49 per cent for Adobe products and 67 per cent for Microsoft products. Submissions compared the prices of more than 50 IT hardware products and found a median price difference of 26 per cent. Comparisons of 70 music products found a median price difference of 67 per cent. For 70 games products it was 61 per cent and for 120 e-books it was 13 per cent.

How can such differences be justified? A lot of possibilities spring to mind. Taxes might be higher in Australia. For physical products, freight and handling costs would be higher. Australian companies may face higher rent and wage costs. And our much higher dollar has greatly improved the comparison between the prices of imports and local prices.

Obviously, the inquiry needed a lot of help from the representatives of the global IT companies to explain these puzzles and possibilities. It didn t get it. The big companies repeatedly declined to appear before the committee, sometimes saying they d be represented by their industry body while the body said it couldn t represent the views of individual members.

So in February the committee took the unusual step of summonsing Apple, Adobe and Microsoft. The evidence they gave was incomplete, conflicting and unconvincing.

It s hard to see how claims of higher costs in Australia can account for the price differences, particularly in the case of content that s delivered digitally. And when the same overseas site puts up its prices for such content as soon as it discovers you re from Australia, it s hard to avoid the conclusion there s something funny going on.

The inquiry concluded that many IT products are more expensive in Australia because of regional pricing strategies implemented by major vendors and copyright holders .

Just so. To anyone with any training in economics it s obvious what s going on: global IT companies are engaging in price discrimination by charging different prices for the same product in different parts of the market. They maximise their profits by charging what the market will bear in each market segment, taking advantage of differences in customers willingness to pay .

Economists have long studied this phenomenon and regard it as perfectly normal profit-maximising behaviour. Global companies charge higher prices in Australia than in the US because they know Australians have a higher willingness to pay than Americans have. Why? For no reason other than that we re used to paying higher prices than the Yanks are used to.

As the inquiry s report acknowledges, there s nothing new about international price discrimination. It s been going on for decades. What s new is the digital revolution. The internet has made it much easier for us to see what s going on and get around it.

Economists know that for price discrimination to succeed, you have to be able to keep the two markets separate. Otherwise people will switch to buying in cheaper markets or some middleman will make a quid by doing it for them.

To keep national markets separate in the old, physical world, many governments used legislative bans on parallel importing , where companies buy in the cheaper market and sell at a discount in the local market.

To keep national markets separate in the digital world, big companies use various forms of geoblocking the use of internet addresses, credit card numbers or other means of electronic identification to block internet sales and downloads of electronic products ... based on the geographic location of the consumer .

There are ways around geoblocking ask any teenager to show you but it s not certain all the ways around are strictly legal.

So the committee recommends the government remove the few remaining parallel importation restrictions in the Copyright Act and also secure consumers rights to circumvent measures supposedly intended to protect copyright, which are being used to impose higher prices on honest customers.

And it should amend the Competition and Consumer Act to render void consumer contracts that seek to enforce geoblocking.

Let s hope Tony Abbott is still listening.

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Internet commerce will foster price competition

The critics of economists often accuse them of trying to change the world to make it more like their textbooks. But now the mountain is coming to Muhammad. The internet, and the electronic commerce it promotes, is making real-life markets work more the way economists assume they do.

As the retailers - particularly the department stores - have sought to explain the weak growth in their sales, their gaze has fallen on the internet. The high dollar has made it more attractive for people to buy stuff on the net from overseas sites. And people who buy from foreign sites don't have to pay goods and services tax on purchases of less than $1000.

As an explanation for their weak sales, it's not persuasive. The share of consumer spending accounted for by internet purchases is still quite small. The more likely explanation is simply a shift in consumer preferences from goods to services.

But internet purchases will become a significant competitive challenge to retailers as people get more experienced at and relaxed about internet shopping. (And as Australia Post gets better at delivering parcels to households without a stay-at-home spouse.)

It's a mistake, however, to imagine it's primarily the high dollar that will drive this trend (or that the presence or absence of a 10 per cent GST makes much difference). No, the primary source of internet bargains is the existence of what economists call ''price discrimination'': the longstanding practice of international suppliers charging higher prices in some markets than others.

Global firms selling books, music, DVDs, software, sneakers and much else know the punters' ''willingness to pay'' varies greatly between countries. Why? Because, for instance, Aussies are simply used to paying higher prices than Americans are.

Such price discrimination is a great way to maximise profits - provided you can keep the various markets separate and stop people in high-price markets switching their purchases to low-price markets.

Various global industries have long used legislated restrictions on ''parallel imports'' to protect their price discrimination arrangements - against which economic rationalists have long fought mainly losing battles. But all that legal protection is being swept away as the internet provides us with direct and easy access to cheaper American goods. This will put a lot of pressure on Australian retailers (and their foreign suppliers and landlords) to lower their prices.

Cyberspace breaks down the natural protection provided by oceans and geographic distance (although, of course, this becomes less true as the bulkiness of the goods in question increases, making transportation over long distances uneconomic).

So it breaks down barriers between certain geographic markets and also breaks down barriers to firms entering a particular market. If you're a big, established player in a physical market, it's very hard for me to start up in competition with you and get myself noticed. In cyberspace, however, a web browser that finds your huge site will list my bedroom operation beside it. It takes the punter only a few clicks to check me out after he's checked you out. Since I don't have the brand recognition you have, my price may well be 5 or 10 per cent lower. I can't charge a premium for my established reputation for quality and reliability.

In its basic form, the economists' model assumes there's no cost in money or time to gather all the information you need to be a fully informed buyer or seller in a market. In reality, there's often a lot of cost involved.

So much so that the possession of information is often ''asymmetric'' - the seller knows a lot more about what's what than the buyer does. This asymmetry tends to favour (professional) business over (amateur) punters (except in the labour market, where a worker knows far more about their personal strengths and weaknesses than a potential employer does).

Clearly, the internet greatly reduces the cost of gathering information so as to make better-informed decisions. This should reduce the asymmetry of information, thus shifting reality closer to the model.

The economists' model focuses on price - the price of the item in question relative to other prices - as the key to how markets work. It assumes relative prices (''incentives'') are the only motivator and that all competition is price competition.

In reality, oligopolies much prefer non-price competition via advertising, marketing (such as the nature of the packaging) and merchandising (where and how you display items in your store).

On the internet, many of these non-price devices are a lot less ''salient'' (prominent), thus making prices more salient. And the internet is a lot better at gathering and comparing price information than information about qualitative considerations.

According to a psychology experiment, when people face a choice between an interesting job paying $80,000 a year and a boring job paying $90,000, most choose the boring one. That's not because they're money-hungry, but because of the limits to our neural processing power: we focus on the numerical comparison because it's a lot easier than the qualitative comparison.

Information technology makes it a lot easier and less costly for firms to adjust their prices (while allowing them to collect better information about the right direction and size of those adjustments).

So it's likely the more commerce we do on the net, the more importance will be attached to price - just as the economists have always assumed.

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