Issues on Digital Economy

Issues on Digital Economy, photo: Gerd Altmann

Course ID:

ECO_241

Semester:

4th

Year of Study:

2nd Year

Category:

Economics Elective

For Erasmus Students:

Yes

eclass URL

Learning Outcomes

This course examines issues regarding how digital technologies influence, shape, chance economic activities. After successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

Define the concept of Digital Economy and identify the characteristics of information goods
Describe the basic architecture of computer networks, the Internet and the WWW and how these influence the economy.
Explain the concept of e-commerce, identify the different models of e-commerce and describe the different business models for digital entreprises.
Study and analyze use cases of e-businesses and identify the elements of the adopted business model
Create a business plan of a digital enterprise using the Business Model Canvas.
Define the basic theoretical underpinnings of cryptocurrencies and describe the architecture and function of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin
Identify the concept of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in the context of Information goods and explain the notions of “openness” like open knowledge, open source, open data, Creative Common licenses
Create websites to support e-commerce using contemporary Web technologies Web (HTML, CSS), open content and open source software.

Course Contents

How digital technologies influence, shape, chance economic activities,
Definitions of the Digital Economy,
The characteristics of Information goods,
Basic ICT technologies. The Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW), The impact of the WWW on today’s economy,
E-business, E-commerce and models of digital entrepreneurship, Use cases of digital entrepreneurship, Create business models and e-commerce websites,
Definition of Cryptocurrencies. The Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Theoretical frameworks for cryptocurrencies (computational complexity, cryptographic hash functions, hash pointers and digital signatures),
Intellectual properties, Openness in the digital economy, Open knowledge, Open data, Open source software, Impact of open technologies on the economy.

Teaching Activities

Lectures (3 hours per week) and Laboratory exercises (2 hours per week)

Teaching Organization

*Activity*	*Semester workload*
Lectures	39 hours
Lab exercise	26 hours
Team Project	60 hours
Quizzes, individual assignments and Self-study	25 hours
Total number of hours for the Course (25 hours of work-load per ECTS credit)	150 hours (total student work-load)

Assessment

Team Project: 30%
Multiple choice exam: 70%

Use of ICT

Slides and notes to support lectures
Software for demonstration and practical application purposes to show statistical data processing.
Use of the E-Learning platform eclass in order to:
- Organize the course material (slides, notes, examples, code snippets etc)
- Perform weekly online quizzes to evaluate the understanding of the related course material
- Hand in homeworks
- Communicate with the students and the class
Open video-lectures