Anatomy of an AI System (Crawford & Joler, 2018)

FRANZISKA KAISER

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich in the Department of Business Administration.
I completed my PhD in Management at HEC Lausanne (University of Lausanne) in April 2025, where I am affiliated with the Digital Markets Lab. In 2024, I was a visiting scholar at Boston University (Questrom School of Business & TPRI).

My interests range from topics in digitization and AI to innovation and IP rights.

What excites me, is conducting research that advances our understanding of the digital economy and shapes its future directions. Over the last decades, we have been observing how digitization and AI has been affecting the creative industries. By analyzing these changes, I hope to shed light on the broader implications of digital disruption for firms and consumers alike.

You can find my CV here.

Publications

Kaiser, F., Cuntz, A., & Peukert, C. (2023). Batman forever? The role of trademarks for reuse in the US comics industry. Research Policy, 52(8), 104820.

We study how trademarks affect reuse of creative works in the comics industry. As a creative industry, the comics industry systematically relies on copyrights. But trademark protection can also be exploited to generate income from the reuse of comic characters or to strategically exclude others from reuse. Our unique data set combines US trademark records of comic characters with information on reuse in print media and franchise products from 1990 to 2017. We find that, on average, additional trademark protection is associated with a reduction in reuse in printed comic books of about 19%. We highlight three mechanisms: first, the negative relationship between trademarking and reuse has been especially pronounced since the early 2000s, when the arrival of digital technologies lowered the costs of entry, promotion, and distribution. Second, our results are driven by less reuse by third parties, not trademark holders. Third, reuse is higher when trademark owners license comic characters to third parties. The negative association between trademarking and reuse carries over to franchise products, but it is weaker and tied to the era of digitization, with a 2% decline in reuse in franchise movies and 9% lower reuse in video games.

Priem, M., Kaiser, F., & Schupp, J. (2020). Zufriedener denn je - Lebensverhältnisse in Deutschland 30 Jahre nach dem Mauerfall. Informationsdienst Soziale Indikatoren, 64, 7-15.

October 3, 2020 marked the 30th anniversary of the German reunification. However, three decades have not yet been enough to completely equalize life satisfaction between East and West Germans. After a continuous shrinking of the "happiness gap" of self-reported life satisfaction in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the difference was smaller than ever in 2018, but had not been completely overcome. This is the conclusion of our analysis, which is based on data from the 2018 survey year of the long-term German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study.

Kaiser, F. (2020). “Diversity and overlapping IP rights in the comic world.” WIPO Magazine, 2020 (4).

Who is your favorite comic superhero? Batman? Wonder Woman? Black Panther? Comic superheroes are an integral part of contemporary pop culture and a multi-billion dollar global industry. New research by WIPO reveals that, over the last 40 years, Batman, Dracula and Spiderman are the top three most-used franchise characters for movies and video games in the United States, the world’s biggest media market. Franchises are derivative works which build on characters developed in original creative works for use in a variety of mediums.

Working Papers

Generative AI and the Dynamic Supply of Training Data (with Christian Peukert, Florian Abeillon, Jérémie Haese, Alexander Staub)

Winner 2024 INFORMS Information Systems Cluster Best Paper Award

Human-created works represent critical data inputs to artificial intelligence (AI). Human behavior can play a major role in AI training datasets, be it in limiting access to existing works or in deciding which types of new works to create or whether to create any at all. We examine creators' behavioral change when their works become training data for AI. Specifically, we focus on contributors on Unsplash, a popular stock image platform with about 6 million high-quality photos and illustrations. In the summer of 2020, Unsplash launched a research program and released a dataset of 25,000 images for commercial AI use. We study contributors' reactions, comparing contributors whose works were included in this dataset to contributors whose works were not. Our results suggest that treated contributors left the platform at a higher-than-usual rate and substantially slowed down the rate of new uploads. Professional photographers and more affected users had a stronger reaction than amateurs and less affected users. We also show that affected users changed the variety and novelty of contributions to the platform, which can potentially lead to lower-quality AI outputs in the long run. Taken together, our findings highlight the trade-off between the interests of rights holders and promoting innovation at the technological frontier. We discuss implications for management and policy.

Get Rich or Die Tryin': Concerts and the Digitization of Recorded Music (with Christian Peukert)

How do physical and digital sales channels interact? We study this question in the music industry, where artists generate income from both physical (concerts) and digital (recorded) music sales. Since the demand for these channels is interrelated, artists play concerts to drive recorded music consumption. Digitization has fundamentally transformed the revenue models of digital sales channels: While CD sales and digital downloads provided one-time payments, streaming technology has introduced usage-based remuneration. We study how the digitization of recorded music has affected the income artists earn from concerts. To do so, we estimate the elasticity of recorded music consumption with respect to concert attendance. Our data tracks concert attendance and recorded music consumption of 7,100 individuals listening to 25,600 artists over four years. Canceled concerts provide a quasi-experimental setting for causal identification. Additionally, our dataset includes detailed information on concert supply, attendance, and revenue. We show that, in aggregate, recorded music income generated by concerts was once economically significant for artists, but its relevance has diminished with digitization. This is because the marginal income from recorded music has decreased, particularly for popular artists, even though the elasticity of concerts on recorded music consumption has remained relatively stable. Our results indicate that income differences between popular and less popular artists stem primarily from direct concert income.

The Evolution of Research on the Digital Economy (single-authored)

Paper Companion Website

Interdisciplinary research increasingly attracts substantial funding due to its potential to address complex questions by integrating diverse perspectives. Research on the digital economy is an interdisciplinary field that has emerged organically, driven by the transformative impact of digital technologies. This meta-study provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of digital economy research, from early internet studies to the rise of digital platforms and the current age of artificial intelligence (AI). The analysis is based on a hand-collected dataset of 8,446 cutting-edge research papers presented at 197 conferences between 1989 and 2024. I enrich this dataset with information on abstracts, authors, and journals from Google Scholar, OpenAlex, and the SSRN Economics of Networks eJournal, and complement it with anecdotal insights from expert interviews. The findings highlight strong growth in the field, reflected in the increasing number of conferences, papers, and the academic community. They also reveal a growing global dispersion and interconnectedness of the research community, despite continued dominance by North American and European institutions. Disciplinary contributions have shifted over time, with earlier work related to computer science, economics, and information systems, while management has emerged as the dominant discipline in recent years. Using natural language processing (NLP), including topic modeling, I identify key research topics and trends and uncover a shift from theoretical exploration to empirical validation and application over time.

Measuring the Returns to Specialization in the Creative Industries (with Gaétan de Rassenfosse)

Specialization is a fundamental principle in economics, but its impact on the creative industries remains a subject of divergence. This study focuses on the comic industry, where the level of specialization among authors differs strongly and has changed significantly over time. We exploit the variation in the levels of specialization of authors to measure the returns to specialization in the creative industries. Our analysis is based on a comprehensive data set of 21,000 French-speaking comic book authors from 1844 to 2022. In contrast to existing literature in other industries, our preliminary findings indicate a negative relationship between higher levels of specialization in the creative industries and artistic outcomes. By delving into the economic implications of specialization in the creative industries, we aim to provide valuable insights for practitioners and policy makers alike.