Information Space (RLE: Organizations)

Chapter 1

Orienting thoughts on information^*

ABSTRACT

The value of information, if taken in the Walrasian sense of utility and scarcity, is indeterminate and can never be fully ascertained. The very act of ascertaining its utility reduces its scarcity. As a consequence, only those information goods whose utility is manifest can be traded unproblematically.

Until quite recently, economics treated information almost exclusively as a support to transactions rather than as an object of transactions in its own right. Yet today, with information becoming increasingly the focus of transactions, its indeterminacy, with respect to value, poses an important theoretical challenge. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that information issues have now become ...