Archive for August, 2005

Economic Fundamentals of the Knowledge Society

Author: P. A. David and D. Foray. Published in Education, e-Journal 1(1): Special Issue: ‘Education and the Knowledge Economy,’ (Spring) 2003. Available at: http://siepr.stanford.edu/papers/pdf/01-14.pdf. Description: This article provides an introduction to fundamental issues in the development of new knowledge-based economies. After placing their emergence in historical perspective and proposing a theoretical framework More »

’Sharing Nicely’: On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production

Author: Yochai Benkler (First published in The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 114, pp. 273-358 (2002). Available: online in full at Yale Law Yournal Description: The paper offers a framework to explain large scale effective practices of sharing private, excludable goods. It starts with case studies of distributed computing and carpooling as motivating problems. More »

Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm

Author: Yochai Benkler (First published in the Yale Law Journal, Vol. 114, page 273 (2004). Available: online in full at http://www.yale.edu/yalelj/112/BenklerWEB.pdf) Description: For decades our understanding of economic production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, More »

The Wiki Way

Author: Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham (authors��� web site: http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WelcomeVisitors) Description: (by Richard Dragon, posted at amazon.com): Suitable for system administrators or managers seeking an affordable content-management solution, The Wiki Way shows off how to take advantage of Wiki collaborative software, which allows users to post and edit content remotely. This book More »

Freakonomics

Author: by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (book‚Äôs web site: http://www.freakonomics.com/) Description: (by John Moe, posted at amazon.com): Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don’t need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections. For More »

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Author: Eric T. Raymond Available at: access to almost the entirety of the evolving book: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ Description: (adapted from Raymond‚Äôs own summary, posted at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/raymond/): Raymond anatomizes a successful open-source project that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. He discusses these More »

The Long Tail

Author: Chris Anderson Available at: (article originally published in October 2004 Wired Magazine, available at http://www.surferzrule.com/z_artic_wired_long_tail2.html) Description: (from Wikipedia article ‚ÄúLong Tail,‚Äù available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail): The phrase “The Long Tail”, as a proper noun, was first coined by Chris Anderson. Beginning in a series of speeches in early 2004 and culminating with the publication More »

Hal Varian’s Web Site

Available at: (available at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/) Description: contains links to numerous papers and articles dealing with the economics of information, information technology, information goods pricing, and market structures in today‚Äôs economy. More »

Information Rules

Author: Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian Available at: (book‚Äôs web site with chapter themes and case examples from book available at http://www.inforules.com/) Description: (from book‚Äôs web site at http://www.inforules.com/): Shapiro and Varian warn managers, “Ignore basic economic principles at your own risk. Technology changes. Economic laws do not.” Understanding these laws and their More »

Free Culture

Author: Lawrence Lessig Available at: (book‚Äôs web site available at http://www.free-culture.cc/) Description: (from book‚Äôs web site, available at http://www.free-culture.cc/about/): Lawrence Lessig‚Äôs focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. In Free Culture he widens his More »

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