Congratulations to Mark Glynn and Cian Buckley who have been awarded 1st place in the Transition Year Young Economist of the Year (YEOTY2016) awards category with their entry titled “Is social media an addictive good?”. Congratulations also to their teacher Barry Moriarty for the time, dedication and effort put into assisting Mark and Cian with this project.
Feedback from Judges
This is a very interesting project that combines economic theory with empirical analysis. For empirical economic research to be informative it needs to be grounded in a firm understanding of the economic theory underlying behaviour. This project uses the economic concept of price elasticity to distinguish between addictive and non-addictive goods. Guided by the insights provided by the theory the researchers carry out an empirical analysis, based on primary data, to determine the extent to which social media can be classified as an addictive good. The use of cinema tickets as a comparison good is a nice illustration of the role of control groups when drawing interferences in economics.
