"Using Uncensored Communication Channels
to Divert Spam Traffic"
by Benjamin Hak-Fung CHIAO

Abstract

We offer a microeconomic model of the two-sided market for the dominant form of spam: bulk, unsolicited, and commercial advertising email. We adopt an incentive-centered design approach to develop a simple, feasible improvement to the current email system using an uncensored (open) communication channel. Such a channel could be an email folder or account, to which properly tagged commercial solicitations are routed. We characterize the circumstances under which spammers would voluntarily move much of their spam into the open channel, leaving the traditional email channel dominated by person-to-person, non-spam mail. Our method follows from inferring that there is a real demand for unsolicited commercial email, so that everyone can be made better off if a channel is provided for spammers to meet spam-demanders. As a bonus, the absence of filtering in an open channel restores to advertisers the incentive to make messages truthful, rather than to disguise them to avoid filters. We show that under certain conditions all email recipients are better off when an open channel is introduced. Only recipients wanting spam will use the open channel enjoying the less disguised messages and cheaper sale prices, and for all recipients the dissatisfaction associated with both undesirable mail received and desirable mail filtered out decreases.

About the speaker

Benjamin Hak-Fung CHIAO is a PhD candidate in the School of Information, University of Michigan. His general interests are the law and economics of information systems and policies, and experimental metho. His specialties are open-content economics, and economic solutions to spam. He has worked on open-content production (non-price coordination experiments, its comparison with communism, and optimal liability rules in licensing), standard-setting organizations, and using uncensored communication channels to reduce spam. His research has appeared in, for example, RAND Journal of Economics. He is currently an active member in the Incentive-Centered Design and the Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions groups at the University of Michigan. Previously, he was Visiting Scholar at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Research Scientist/Director of Operations at NYU, both in the new labs he helped establish. He co-founded the Ann Arbor Chinese Intellectuals group, which regularly hosts activities such as academic salons. His recent invited talks include those in: Academia Sinica, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia U., National Taiwan U., Peking U., Shanghai Jiaotong U., Singapore Management U., Tsinghua U., UC Irvine, U. of Michigan, U. of Toulouse, and U. of Washington.