Measuring How Users Value Meta’s Family of Apps and Other Digital Goods

We will run the survey on the Facebook platform. Users will receive an invitation to participate in a survey. If users accept the terms and conditions, we will then elicit their valuations for Facebook using DBDC. They will first be asked if they would be willing to stop using Facebook for a month in exchange for an amount of money that will be randomized across users. Users who accept the first offer will be offered a smaller amount in the second round, and users who reject the first offer will be offered a higher amount (users will not be aware of this protocol to avoid strategic choices). For a small set of users, their responses will be taken into consideration and they will be offered the money they accepted in exchange for deactivating Facebook for a month. We will monitor their activation status and pay them the offered amount at the end of the 1 month period if they stay deactivated for the whole month.
We will then ask users hypothetical questions to separately elicit their valuations for Instagram and Whatsapp. These valuations will be elicited using the SBDC method, which uses a single question to users asking whether they would be willing to stop using the app in exchange for a random amount of money.
Finally, to contextualize these estimates, we will ask users hypothetical questions using BWS (best-worst scaling) to elicit their valuations for other digital goods such as Snapchat, Google Search, or YouTube. We will present users with a random subset of choices, where the combinations of choices are randomly chosen using a balanced-incomplete block design. Users will be asked to choose the best and worst options according to the BWS approach. Possible options could be: stop using Google Search for a month, earn $50 less for a month, and stop using Snapchat for a month.

2022-02-28

2022-03-21

The main outcome of interest will be the value individuals across the 15 countries assign to Facebook. We will analyze how these valuations vary across subpopulations of respondents, such as country, age, gender, or education, etc. and how these valuations compare to users’ hypothetical valuations for other digital services such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok. We will calculate median valuations within groups of users using the methods described below.

We will randomize participants into a set of groups that will be offered different initial offer values. The group with the lowest offer values can be seen as a control group, while those with higher offer values can be seen as treatment groups. In each group, users will first be asked if they would be willing to stop using Facebook for a month in exchange for a random amount of money within a subset of monetary values.

For more efficient data collection, users will be offered a second monetary value: users who accept the first offer will be offered a smaller amount in the second round, and users who reject the first offer will be offered a higher amount.

By comparing take-up rates across groups that received different offer values, we will estimate the median valuation that users in a sample place on Facebook.

An analogous approach will be used to estimate the median valuation that users in a sample place on Instagram and WhatsApp, except that this valuation will be based on hypothetical questions asked using an SBDC approach.

Randomization done by a computer

Individual

No

N/A

We expect to have responses from around 70,000 users across 15 countries.

The total sample of 70,000 users will be evenly distributed across 9 initial offer values.