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  3. Most of us are acutely aware of how much mobile data we consume on our phones and tablets. That’s because Americans are largely

Most of us are acutely aware of how much mobile data we consume on our phones and tablets. That’s because Americans are largely

admin2017-04-29  56
问题     Most of us are acutely aware of how much mobile data we consume on our phones and tablets. That’s because Americans are largely bound to cellular plans that come with data caps—monthly limits on usage that apply steep overage fees or other penalties for going over. It turns out that data caps are incredibly effective at getting people to use less data, and not merely on cellphone plans. A new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research takes actual, real-world data on data usage from a North American Internet provider and shows that even for people on fixed, wired home broadband, data caps have a dramatic effect on consumer behavior.
    The study looks at tens of thousands of subscribers belonging to an unnamed provider of high-speed broadband. And one key finding is that the closer people get to hitting their data caps, the more they make a conscious decision to use less Internet. "We provide a lot of evidence that people are very, very good at managing their usage over the course of a month," said Jonathan Williams, a co-author of the paper. "We see people pull back substantially when the possibility of overages comes up."
    This might sound obvious in the context of your cellular bill; you probably know how much data you pay for by heart. But Williams was studying the effect of data caps on residential Internet. The really interesting difference has to do with folks on data-capped or usage-based plans versus those on "unlimited" plans with no data caps. At the time the data was collected, in 2012, this particular provider offered higher speeds to those on capped plans, perhaps as incentive to get unlimited data users to switch. This gets us to the heart of the economics of data caps.
    According to the study, people who were on unlimited data plans effectively paid less per gigabyte of data compared to their counterparts on metered plans. From the Internet provider’s perspective, that’s lost revenue, which explains why providers have a strong incentive to nudge(劝说)people to adopt metered plans. Metered plans have a higher payoff for the company.
    But do metered plans pay off for the consumer? According to Williams’ economic modeling, the subscribers in his dataset were far, far more willing to pay for an extra bit of speed. If you think about prices as a reflection of demand, the average user was willing to pay on average $ 2 for an extra 1 Mbps of speed. By contrast, people were willing to pay, on average, only $ 0.36 for an extra GB of data. In other words, people valued the extra speed they got from the metered plans far more than they valued the extra data they got on unlimited data plans.
What restrains people from using more data?
选项 A、Cellphone apps.
B、Cellular plans.
C、Data caps.
D、Overcharged fees.
答案C
解析
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