The Micro- and Macroeconomics of Information

摘要

Economic products and processes have always involved information, but technological innovation has changed society in such a way that information is now at the center of economic thinking and practice. At the microeconomic level, several strands of work dealing with problems that range from decision making under uncertainty to the nature of risk are now collectively referred to as the "economics of information," with the phrase "the information economy" often used to refer to informational issues at the macroeconomic level. The two interact: As consciousness of the evolution of the information economy has grown, the amount of pertinent microeconomic work has increased; and as new ways of thinking about microeconomic informational issues appear, they in turn inspire new macroeconomic questions. Both micro- and macro-economic thought deal with the same problem-how to understand information creation, processing, flows, and use from an economic perspective. Accordingly, this chapter uses the phrase "the economics of information" as an umbrella term to refer to issues raised by information at every level of analysis. The question of how to define information itself has also been problematic. As Porat (1977) noted, there is not even a single definition that embraces all aspects of the information industries as a primary sector. Babe (2004) has suggested that it may be this very definitional difficulty that has led to so much confusion for economists working in this area. Information changes over time, depending on context and relationships with other information, just as it has multiple identities at any given point in time, depending upon the perspective of the entity accessing and/or using it. When information is understood as a commodity, it is a commodity that is heterogeneous (Allen, 1990; Porat, 1977).