Information rules

What Hacker News says

1. titheJun 2024
   Here's a bunch that are on the bookshelf at the moment:

   - Information Rules - Carl Shapiro & Hal Varian

   - Normal Accidents - Charles Perrow

   - Why Buildings Stand Up: The Strength of Architecture - Mario Salvadori

   - Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - Jordan Peterson

   - The Power Broker - Robert Caro

   - Political Order and Political Decay - Francis Fukuyama

   - The Creators - Daniel Boorstin

   - The Square and the Tower - Niall Ferguson

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2. kemitchellMar 2024
   I wonder if software really deserves its own economics.

   If you haven't read Hal Varian's Information Rules, I highly recommend it. Check the publication date, then read it anyway, then reflect on the publication date when you're done. I found it very worthwhile.

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3. dredmorbiusSep 2023
   Unfortunately, not all services describable as utilities are in fact regulated as utilities. There are many who still consider water, gas, electricity, and sewerage as luxuries, let alone comms and data. Some in political office.

   Otherwise, you're generally arguing in agreement with my fundamental point, or ignoring the fact that many individuals and/or businesses (and many businesses, as sole proprietorships, are individuals) lack the time, knowledge, and/or capabilities to sufficiently diversify their service provision relationships. Or, as I've mentioned several times already, many mid-sized and larger firms. Particularly as the underlying technological landscape is constantly shifting and* is operated by those who'd much prefer to create lock-in.

   See Shapiro & Varian's 1999 classic Information Rules. Little has changed. <https://store.hbr.org/product/information-rules-a-strategic-...>

   (Though Varian now works for one of the lock-in merchants: Google.)

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4. kemitchellAug 2020
   Intellectual property law is only coherent in the face of information. It's the property law of intangibles.

   Economics didn't run up to the industrial revolution and stop. The book I cited, Slauter's Who Owns the News?, gives a great history of English law from before the Statute of Anne. For a view from the Internet era back, on an economics angle, Shapiro and Varian's Information Rules is a great read. For a more nuanced view from those who lean open, James Boyle's books are all worthwhile.

   The author is, as it happens, an open-leaning intellectual property lawyer.

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5. davidwJul 2019
   The term from economics that describes the situation well is "switching costs". They're very high in this case, as comments regarding banks migrating away indicate.

   This book is a great overview of the economics of these kinds of situations:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Rules

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6. webmavenMar 2019
   > the extracted payments are personal information---which is not captured in any economic theory I've ever seen---and the moat blocking competitive pressure is the combined result of network effects (bigger databases win) and extensive financial capitalization.

   You might take a look at Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian's 1999 boom Information Rules:

   https://books.google.com/books?id=z0hQ12PrERMC&printsec=fron...

   As well as their (along with Joseph Farrell) 2004 book The Economics of Information:

   https://books.google.com/books?id=-dcLAQAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...

   It is perhaps surprising that Varian in particular (Google's Chief Economist) hasn't had more to say about data as a raw material in the years since those books came out.

   BTW, your "extracted payments are personal information" formulation may be part of your problem in finding relevant economic theories. At least in part, what is being extracted is actually a capitulation to being locked-in to a system that continuously extracts information. So looking into the economic theories of technology vendor lock-in, as well as the perverse economics of information security may provide some insight.

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