Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Understanding Governments And Citizens On-Line: Learning From E-Commerce, Tobias Escher, Helen Margetts

Helen Z Margetts

Economists studying commercial activity on-line argue that the most significant difference between on-line and off-line commerce is the ability of firms to ‘know who your customers are and treat them differently’ (Vulkan 2006), customizing prices and offerings. This difference comes from the huge amount of data generated by on-line transactions, in terms of historical records, usage statistics and real-time data. Yet in political life, governmental organizations and political parties have been far slower to use such data to improve their service offerings and devise innovative policy interventions, such as differential pricing and personalized information provision. Likewise, political scientists lag behind …