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.

http://siepr.stanford.edu/papers/pdf/01-14.pdf.

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 Continue reading »

• 14th Aug, 2005
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’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).

online in full at Yale Law Yournal

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. Continue reading »

• 14th Aug, 2005
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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).

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, Continue reading »

• 14th Aug, 2005
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The Wiki Way

Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham (authors��� web site: http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WelcomeVisitors)

(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 Continue reading »

• 14th Aug, 2005
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Freakonomics

Author:

by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (book’s web site: http://www.freakonomics.com/)

(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 Continue reading »

• 14th Aug, 2005
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The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Author:

Eric T. Raymond

access to almost the entirety of the evolving book: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

(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 Continue reading »

• 14th Aug, 2005
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The Long Tail

Author:

Chris Anderson

(article originally published in October 2004 Wired Magazine, available at http://www.surferzrule.com/z_artic_wired_long_tail2.html)

(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 Continue reading »

• 14th Aug, 2005
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Hal Varian’s Web Site

Available at:

(available at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/)

contains links to numerous papers and articles dealing with the economics of information, information technology, information goods pricing, and market structures in today’s economy.

• 14th Aug, 2005
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Information Rules

Author:

Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian

(book’s web site with chapter themes and case examples from book available at http://www.inforules.com/)

(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 Continue reading »

• 14th Aug, 2005
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Free Culture

Author:

Lawrence Lessig

(book’s web site available at http://www.free-culture.cc/)

(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 Continue reading »

• 14th Aug, 2005
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