Competition in the Digital Age
Epiphany plays an outsized role in the reductionist two-step model of invention. Step one is when an idea pops into an inventor’s head, and step two is when the invention spreads in an economy over time. This model is misleading in numerous ways that would take a book to enumerate. Today’s column focuses on step …
Continue reading "Spillovers, Bottlenecks, and More Invention After Invention"
I should have gone straight to Wikipedia. Instead I put the Latin words “In Situ” into Google. The dermatologist had spelled it for me, and the Wikipedia entry appeared at the top. It said the following, “In archaeology, in situ refers to an artifact that has not been moved from its original place of deposition. …
Continue reading "A pound of flesh for touching the progress of science"
You may not have noticed, but recently the Huffington Post has been the poster child for lack of journalistic integrity. The actual details may appear to be small to many people, but not to me. HuffPo has made a sloppy journalistic error, publishing a historically inaccurate story, and on a claim many experts have proven …
Ronald Coase passed away yesterday. In his 102 years, he had an extraordinarily widespread impact on economics; especially its interactions with legal thinking. There is much discussion today about his contributions; in particular, was the Coase Theorem really a theorem and the Coase conjecture ever proved. But, in so many respects, those discussions miss the …
Last summer I expressed an interest in meeting musician David Lowery to discuss the evolution of the music industry. Long story short: we’re getting together at the University of Minnesota next Friday, April 19 for an event entitled “Resolved: Napster is the Best/Worst Thing That's Ever Happened to Music.” The event title is a bit …
I gave a seminar earlier this month at the iSchool at Berkeley. It was on my research with Susan Athey and Emilio Calvano into the future of the news media. Being an iSchool, they placed the entire video (90 minutes) on YouTube.
These days publishers are moving towards DRM free options. This has the advantage of freeing customers from Amazon lock-in as well as just making it easier for them to control their content. So for consumers who want to pay, this makes their product more valuable and gives them a reason to pay. But for the …
Continue reading "What are publishers afraid of with device restrictions?"
Information Wants to be Shared focusses on business models for information content provision. But the principles behind it, that information is more valuable if it is exchanged freely, obviously extend to many other matters. One such matter is health-related information. John Wilbanks is a crusader that has taken the issue of health sharing on. As …
Digitopoly 