Date
2016
Department or Program
Economics
Additional Department or Program (if any)
Mathematics
Primary Wellesley Thesis Advisor
Daniel Sichel
Additional Advisor(s)
Robin McKnight
Abstract
The landscape in the information technology (IT) sector is changing rapidly, and studying price trends for a newly developed IT services provides a great gateway to gauge these changes. Cloud computing—the on-demand delivery of computing resources and applications via the Internet—is rapidly expanding yet relatively little is know about trends in prices of cloud computing. For my senior economics thesis, I constructed quality-adjusted price indexes to quantify the rate of price change of Cloud Computing Services. I employ two hedonic regression methods as well as the matched model method and the results suggest that Cloud Computing Services experienced a sharp price decline from 2009-2015. My results also indicate that the price reduction trend of Cloud Computing Services is slightly sharper than that of Computing Products in general (hardware and software).