Department of Economics, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH, United States of America.
Department of Advertising + Public Relations, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Dec 19;13(12):e0207101. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0207101. eCollection 2018.
Facebook, the online social network, has more than 2 billion global users. Because those users do not pay for the service, its benefits are hard to measure. We report the results of a series of three non-hypothetical auction experiments where winners are paid to deactivate their Facebook accounts for up to one year. Though the populations sampled and the auction design differ across the experiments, we consistently find the average Facebook user would require more than $1000 to deactivate their account for one year. While the measurable impact Facebook and other free online services have on the economy may be small, our results show that the benefits these services provide for their users are large.
脸书（Facebook）是一家全球拥有超过 20 亿用户的在线社交网络平台。由于这些用户无需为该服务付费，因此很难衡量其收益。我们报告了一系列三项非假设性拍卖实验的结果，在这些实验中，获胜者可获得报酬，让他们在未来一年时间内停用其脸书账户。虽然抽样人群和拍卖设计在三个实验中有所不同，但我们始终发现，普通脸书用户需要超过 1000 美元才能停用其账户一年。虽然脸书和其他免费在线服务对经济的可衡量影响可能很小，但我们的结果表明，这些服务为用户带来的收益是巨大的。
