Joan-Josep Vallbé
Dr Joan-Josep Vallbé (1976) is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Joan-Josep is a political scientist with a data-analysis orientation. Between 2005 and 2014 he taught political science at the University of Barcelona. He works with social and computer scientists, sociologists, urban designers, and legal professionals, on how to model, measure, and analyze the patterns of interaction between citizens and variation in their (mainly institutional) environment. Change may occur in micro-level contexts such as problem spaces in choice situations, or in macro-level phenomena such as metropolitan growth or the regulatory environment. His work on institutional indicators underscores the need to obtain reliable measures of institutional performance and adaptation to better explore and analyze the effects of institutional change on citizens.
The book he has recently published is a result of such effort. And so is his current work on the empirical approach to alternative compensation systems(vis-à-vis copyright), and his articles about the measurement of the quality of regulatory environments, and about the effects of metropolitan suburbanization on civic engagement and political orientations.
Publicaties
| Bodó, B., Handke, C.W., Quintais, J., Vallbé, J. Knocking on Heaven’s Door: User preferences on digital cultural distribution In: Internet Policy Review, vol. 8, nr. 2, 2019. @article{Vallb\'{e}2019,This paper explores the social, demographic and attitudinal basis of consumer support of a Copyright Compensation System (CCS), which, for a small monthly fee would legalise currently infringing online social practices such as private copying from illegal sources and online sharing of copyrighted works. We do this by first identifying how different online and offline, legal and illegal, free and paying content acquisition channels are used in the media market using a cluster-based classification of respondents. Second, we assess the effect of cultural consumption on the support for a shift from the status quo towards alternative, CCS-based forms of digital cultural content distribution. Finally, we link these two analyses to identify the factors that drive the dynamics of change in digital cultural consumption habits. Our study shows significant support to a CCS compared to the status quo by both occasional and frequent buyers of cultural goods, despite the widespread adoption of legal free and paying online services by consumers. The nature of these preferences are also explored with the inclusion of consumer preference intensities regarding certain CCS attributes. Our results have relevant policy implications, for they outline CCS as a reform option. In particular, they point evidence-based copyright reform away from its current direction in the EU of stronger enforcement measures, additional exclusive rights, and increased liability and duties of care for online platforms. This work shows that CCS may be an apt policy tool to hinder piracy and potentially increase right holder revenues, while respecting fundamental rights and promoting technological development. |
| Bodó, B., Handke, C.W., Quintais, J., Vallbé, J. Knocking on Heaven's Door - User Preferences on Digital Cultural Distribution In: 2015. @article{,14 July 2015.<br /> This paper explores the social, demographic and attitudinal basis of consumer support to a change from the status quo in digital cultural distribution. First we identify how different online and offline, legal and illegal, free and paying content acquisition channels are used in the Dutch media market using a cluster-based classification of respondents according to their cultural consumption. Second, we assess the effect of cultural consumption on the support to the introduction of a Copyright Compensation System (CCS), which, for a small monthly fee would legalize currently infringing online social practices such as private copying from illegal sources and online sharing of copyrighted works. Finally, we link these two analyses to identify the factors that drive the dynamics of change in digital cultural consumption habits. |
| Guibault, L., Handke, C.W., Vallbé, J. Is Europe Falling Behind in Data Mining? Copyright's Impact on Data Mining in Academic Research In: 2015. @article{,This empirical paper discusses how copyright affects data mining (DM) by academic researchers. Based on bibliometric data, we show that where DM for academic research requires the express consent of rights holders: (1) DM makes up a significantly lower share of total research output; and (2) stronger rule-of-law is associated with less DM research. To our knowledge, this is the first time that an empirical study bears out a significant negative association between copyright protection and innovation. |
| Bodó, B., Handke, C.W., Vallbé, J. Going means trouble and staying makes it double: the value of licensing recorded music online In: Journal of Cultural Economics, 2015. @article{,This paper discusses whether a copyright compensation system (CCS) for recorded music—endowing private Internet subscribers with the right to download and use works in return for a fee—would be welfare increasing. It reports on the results of a discrete choice experiment conducted with a representative sample of the Dutch population consisting of 4986 participants. Under some conservative assumptions, we find that applied only to recorded music, a mandatory CCS could increase the welfare of rights holders and users in the Netherlands by over €600 million per year (over €35 per capita). This far exceeds current rights holder revenues from the market of recorded music of ca. €144 million per year. A monthly CCS fee of ca. €1.74 as a surcharge on Dutch Internet subscriptions would raise the same amount of revenues to rights holders as the current market for recorded music. With a voluntary CCS, the estimated welfare gains to users and rights holders are even greater for CCS fees below €20 on the user side. A voluntary CCS would also perform better in the long run, as it could retain a greater extent of market coordination. The results of our choice experiment indicate that a well-designed CCS for recorded music would simultaneously make users and rights holders better off. This result holds even if we correct for frequently observed rates of overestimation in contingent valuation studies. |
| Vallbé, J. Springer, 2015, ISBN: 9789401794268. @book{,This book deals with the theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of bounded rationality in the operation of institutions. It focuses on decisions made under uncertainty, and presents a reliable strategy of knowledge acquisition for the design and implementation of decision-support systems. Based on the distinction between the inner and outer environment of decisions, the book explores both the cognitive mechanisms at work when actors decide, and the institutional mechanisms existing among and within organizations that make decisions fairly predictable.<br /> While a great deal of work has been done on how organizations act as patterns of events for (boundedly) rational decisions, less effort has been devoted to study under which circumstances organizations cease to act as such reliable mechanisms. Through an empirical strategy on open-ended response data from a survey among junior judges, the work pursues two main goals. The first one is to explore the limits of “institutional rationality” of the Spanish lower courts on-call service, an optimal scenario to observe decision-making under uncertainty. The second aim is to achieve a better understanding of the kind of uncertainty under which inexperienced decision-makers work. This entails exploring the demands imposed by problems and the knowledge needed to deal with them, making this book also a study on expertise achievement in institutional environments.<br /> This book combines standard multivariate statistical methods with machine learning techniques such as multidimensional scaling and topic models, treating text as data. Doing so, the book contributes to the collaboration between empirical social scientific approaches and the community of scientists that provide the set of tools and methods to make sense of the fastest growing resource of our time: data. |