AImpact Center Seminar Series: Dr. Joel Waldfogel, "AI and the quantity and quality of creative products: have LLMs boosted creation of valuable books?"
- Sponsor
- Illinois AImpact Center
- Speaker
- Dr. Joel Waldfogel
- Registration
- Registration
- Contact
- Allison Mette
- agk@illinois.edu
- Originating Calendar
- Siebel School Speakers Calendar
Abstract: The arrival of LLMs has facilitated increased creation of new books. As LLMs have diffused between 2022 and 2025, the number of new books appearing for sale each month at Amazon nearly tripled. We develop a ratings-based usage measure that is comparable across book release vintages, and we find that the vintages from the AI influx period have lower average quality. Yet, the top 1,000 monthly releases per category -- albeit not the top 100 -- have higher quality than before; and the effect is larger in categories with faster growth in new titles. A nested logit calibration shows that LLM-enhanced book production could, in steady state, double the surplus that consumers derived from book markets. The advent of LLMs does not displace incumbent author activity; instead, it raises their productivity.
Bio: Joe Waldfogel was previously the Ehrenkranz Family Professor of Business and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where he had served as department chair and associate vice dean. Prior to Wharton, Waldfogel was an associate professor of economics at Yale University. From 2017-2023 he served as associate dean for MBA and MS programs at the Carlson School.
His main research interests are industrial organization and law and economics, and he has conducted empirical studies of price advertising, media markets, the operation of differentiated product markets, and issues related to digital products, including piracy, pricing, and revenue sharing. He has published more than 80 articles in scholarly outlets, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the RAND Journal of Economics. He also has published several books, including Digital Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2018), The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can't Always Get What You Want (Harvard University Press, 2007) and Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton University Press, 2009). During 2021-2022 he was the Kamenstein Scholar at the US Copyright Office. He has also written for Slate.
Waldfogel received a BA in economics from Brandeis University and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. He grew up in South Minneapolis, graduating from Washburn High School.