「经济学人」College blues

The value of having the right text-message bubbles

What is the price of cool? About $31 a month, according to new research by Leonardo Bursztyn of the University of Chicago and co-authors. That is how much college students had to be paid to have their iPhone messages appear to others in a (lame) green rather than a (fashionable) blue bubble for four weeks. Introduced to indicate that a message has been sent by services other than Apple’s iMessage, the green bubble has become a marker for those either insufficiently wealthy to afford an iPhone or insufficiently aware of the stigma stemming from their preference for Android, another operating system. Better avoided, unless there is a reward.

The researchers offered American students a choice of participating in experiments with different conditions. In the control, students simply had to upload screenshots and receive a text message, which set a baseline for how much they valued their privacy and avoiding hassle. Participants in the three other groups were paid to deactivate certain features on their phone: the blue bubbles; iMessage, which provides a few services in addition to the colour; and the camera. On average, students required $18 to participate in the control group, and $49, $69 and $86, respectively, in the three other groups.

For the researchers, such results demonstrate Apple’s market dominance. Ideally, firms would compete to make their products as good and cheap as possible. The tech giant’s position allows it to take another approach: making rivals suffer. Since the introduction of common network standards last year, the original justification for Android messages appearing as green has gone. Still, the company has kept the markers. Documents released in an antitrust lawsuit filed against Apple by Epic Games, a gaming firm, reveal that the tech giant’s bosses saw iMessage as a way of keeping users locked in.

One possibility is that the green bubbles represent a co-ordination problem for students. After all, most respondents—among both Apple and Android users—told the researchers that they wanted uniformly coloured bubbles. In principle, competition provides that option; there are no colour distinctions on services such as Signal or WhatsApp. The issue could be that persuading all your friends, or indeed a whole campus, to switch, and eliminate stigma, is a difficult endeavour. There is another possibility, however. Maybe iPhone users enjoy the status boost too much to forgo the sought-after blue bubbles, whatever they say in surveys.

This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “College blues”(Apr 24th 2025)

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